© 2025 News On The Block. All rights reserved.
News on the Block is a trading name of Premier Property Media Ltd.
© 2025 News On The Block. All rights reserved.
News on the Block is a trading name of Premier Property Media Ltd.
The Ombudsman for Estate Agents (OEA) scheme is planning to grow its coverage of the Scottish property market following a fact-finding visit to Glasgow by the Ombudsman, Christopher Hamer.
Christopher Hamer was invited to Glasgow by two leading estate agents and a solicitor to review the country’s property market and to assess the relevance of it for the OEA.
The OEA already offers its mediation and redress service through 130 estate agency offices in Scotland, This is compared with 11,000 in England and Wales combined.
But estate agency businesses are expanding in Scotland. The OEA believe that around 60 per cent of properties in Glasgow are now marketed through estate agencies rather than solicitors.
The OEA scheme is funded solely by estate agents but operated entirely separately from them under a governing council chaired by Lord Borrie, who served as director general of Fair Trading under successive Labour and Conservative governments.
Hamer said: “The public can use my services entirely free of charge if they have a complaint against a member agent which has not been successfully resolved through the agent’s own disputes procedure.
“Estate agent members have to commit to a Code of Conduct approved by the Office of Fair Trading for the residential property industry, and this also helps to ensure higher standards. As the scheme grows in Scotland, I urge people buying and selling properties to look out for our triangular logo and use agents who display it.”