« Scoop: Real estate agent rating website launched | Home | An RE.net taxonomy: Identifying types of real estate weblogs | BloodhoundBlog: National real estate marketing and technology weblog | There’s always something to howl about… »
Agent responsibilities and help for Limited English Proficiency clients… | Rain City Guide | A Seattle Real Estate Blog…
By admin | June 15, 2007
Agent responsibilities and help for Limited English Proficiency clients… June 14, 2007
I’ve run into this before while running my daily business of real estate sales. A client comes to you and wants to buy a property, whether it is for investment or residential purposes. You learn during the process of interviewing each other that the client is from another country where English is not the major spoken language. In speaking with the client, you note that they have a certain level of understanding but that’s in conversational English. Do you need to ask if anything needs to be translated for their benefit? Do you, as their agent, need to pay for a translator or to search out if any documents may be in translated form to the client’s native language? This has even come up in ethics classes I’ve attended and included whether or not an agent would be required to hire a translator for not only spoken language but also for sign language clients. While I don’t try to intrepret the laws, my understanding is that agents are required to offer it and/or provide it if the client requests it and this is mostly due to making sure we are meeting Fair Housing guidelines of providing services to all those covered under its tenets.
The majority of my non-USA clients have had excellent proficiency in the English language and we do ask if the client would like to have anything translated especially once we get to the contract language. For the most part we’ve been told that they aren’t uncomfortable and that they feel fine with what they’ve read and understood. We did have a transaction where we helped a client sell a mobile home and the Latino immigrant that bought it and his wife didn’t have as good a grasp as the client. Since they didn’t have a real estate agent helping them I hired a translator for their benefit so that they would be comfortable with the transaction and to reduce the potential liability for my client to be charged with duping them after the sale. We wanted to make sure the customer (buyer) knew exactly what they were getting into with the purchase. These folks were very thankful for the assistance and that we cared enough to make sure they understood the documents and we also steered them toward a lender we knew provided Spanish speaking loan officers.
Topics: cool articles |