On Closer Inspection: I can’t teach ethics with a quiz

The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author.

On Closer Inspection with Dixie Lee MacDonald — a second look at the rules, language, and habits of Ontario real estate. MacDonald is a sales representative and a real estate educator with various organizations. She has spent 16+ years in residential resale — and even longer reading the fine print.

A seller once told me, near the end of a listing appointment, that the roof had been fixed. She was in her eighties, and she was certain. When the leak first showed up, she had hired her nephew to deal with it. He told her it was pinhole leaking, nothing serious, and that he had pinned up a barrier to stop it. She believed him, and of course she did. He was family, and he had come when she called. She felt he had charged her fairly.

I had been in the attic an hour earlier. I had seen the staining, the daylight at the flashing and the plastic sheeting he had stapled up underneath it. Pinning up a barrier does not fix a leak. Water was still coming in, and I was fairly sure she had seen it come in herself, because the marks on the ceiling below were not old. She had decided it was fixed. She was not asking me anything. I was the one with the problem.

Registration education does not cover that, and it is not meant to. I knew the disclosure rule. What I had to work out on my own was how to have that conversation with a woman I liked, in her own kitchen, about a nephew she trusted.

Where the last column left off

A few weeks ago, I wrote that the organizations in our industry are rooms without a hallway, and that the fix is not a merger but a shared path for ethics, training and understanding for new registrants after they are licensed. I ended with a proposal: one standardized course, delivered at the brokerage level, focused on ethical interpretation of the legislation and the dilemmas that come up in an ordinary week.

This column is about what that course is for. It cannot look like the courses we already have.

First, registration education in Ontario is more than adequate. It teaches the law thoroughly, and the people who designed it did their job. The problem is that no course can teach judgment to someone who has never had a client. Ethical dilemmas come with clients, and nobody has a client until after registration.

The ‘Code’ is not the same thing

When I say applied ethics, I do not mean the Realtor Code of Ethics. The Code tells you what you must do, and it does that well. It sets the minimum. Applied ethics is what happens when the Code, the Act and the client’s wishes point in three directions at once and you must pick a direction before the opportunity to do it well has passed.

My seller was not hiding anything. She was telling me the truth as she knew it, because someone she loved had told it to her. The Code says I disclose what I know. It does not tell me how to explain to a woman in her eighties that the barrier her nephew pinned up was not a fix and that perhaps he had charged her for a job he really didn’t do.

The Act does not cover any of that, and registrants deal with it every day. This belongs in continuing education, not at the front end. Nobody has these questions when they register. They come after the first real transaction, when the registrant finds out that the rule does not tell you what to do in the moment.

What read and click actually proves

We already have online continuing education, and some of it is fine. Most of it is delivered the same way: open a module, scroll, answer 10 questions, print the certificate. I have done it with a listing appointment open in the next tab, and I am not alone. The format invites it.

If you miss a question, you scroll back and find the answer. Nobody argues with you or asks you to defend a position, because nobody is there. The certificate records that the material was covered, and for some subjects that is enough.

Ethics is not one of those subjects. You learn it by saying what you would do and having another registrant tell you why they would do something different. Without that discussion, the course is a compliance record.

What it should look like

One course, standardized across the province, and mandatory. Not one option among several for filling a continuing education credit.

Live, in person or by video. Small groups, built around cases. You get a scenario with no clean answer, you take a position, and you defend it against the people who chose differently. Then the facilitator asks what the client would say if she heard this conversation.

Delivered at the brokerage level, because brokerages already carry the supervision obligation for the people they register, and this gives that obligation some content. It also means the conversation happens among other registrants who have faced their own ethical dilemmas and tensions.

Facilitated by experienced people but not the broker of record, the manager or a senior colleague, because few registrants speak freely about a dilemma in front of the people who sign their cheques and review their files. The facilitator should be someone who has done this work for years, has trained to lead this kind of discussion and has no stake in who said what.

The objections

It costs money. It takes time out of the week. We already have continuing education.

All true. But we have had continuing education for years, and the public does not trust us any more than it did.

The room

I asked my seller to come up to the attic with me. She couldn’t manage the ladder, so I took photographs, and we looked at them together at her kitchen table. I asked whether she had noticed any water coming in during the recent rain. She paused before answering, and I think we both knew the answer. I pointed to the pinholes of light at the flashing and told her that was where it was still getting through, barrier or no barrier. Her face changed. She had seen the water come in and had taken her nephew’s word over what she saw. I didn’t say anything about him, and she didn’t ask. She had come to it herself. After a while she asked what a roofer would cost, and we went from there.

I told her the truth because that is the job. I knew I could lose the listing and I told her anyway. It worked out for me that day. Other times it did not, and nobody ever asked me afterward what I did or why. I would have liked to be asked. I would have liked to practise explaining my decision before being in that ethical tension in the moment. That must change. Every registrant in this province should be required to sit in a room and defend their choices out loud. This course is how we do it.

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