Our nation’s real estate market is requested with an improvement due to the paradigm shift, which includes market opening, consumer-focused market reorganization, and digital informationization. However, despite these structural pressures, barely an...
Our nation’s real estate market is requested with an improvement due to the paradigm shift, which includes market opening, consumer-focused market reorganization, and digital informationization. However, despite these structural pressures, barely any changes were made in real estate agency’s requirements, tests and educational systems. As time pass, the average age of registered real estate brokers are declining, and applicants’ scholastic abilities are elevating in a significant degree. This produced an urgent task to convert the social awareness upon real estate brokers: it needs to regain their reputation and to make the job a professional one. Moreover, the need for higher education and expert knowledge for real estate brokers is increasing, and this increasing demands make high quality education for them inevitable.
Under this context, the purpose of this research is to define how the problem of Korea's real estate broker qualification examination system is causing frequent accidents in real estate transactions and negative social perception on the job. With these explanations, this study attempt to suggest several recommendations to improve the real estate broker system in Korea.
For this purpose, this study compared the real estate broker system of Korea and California, USA. For this comparison, this study used literature review and questionnaire survey. Statistical analysis was conducted using data obtained from the questionnaire survey.
The theoretical basis used in this study is new institutionalism and analytical framework used in the questionnaire survey was developed from new institutional theories.
Survey questionnaire was composed of several dimensions including perception on the environment of real estate brokerage market, real estate exam policy, real estate educational system, and the level of satisfaction of the job. Study results are as follows.
1. Perceived necessity of improving the environment of real estate transaction market was surveyed higher in Korean real estate market than California.
2. With regard to the real estate qualification exam system, California had higher awareness on its importance, and showed higher need for improvement in test subjects than Korea.
3. In the education system, the California showed a higher perception for improving education system, training and in-service education system than Korea.
4. California showed higher level of job satisfaction than Korea.
Based on the above stated findings and problems, recommendations for the field of real estate in Korea are as follows.
First, only the people who sufficiently attended university-designed pre-license education should be qualified to take the real estate broker test. Also, it is necessary to allow people who accomplished 4-year college degree from real estate studies to be exempted from all or part of test subjects. Besides, the first and the second exam should be distinguished. The first exam should be a theoretical exam, and people who passed it should be trained to a certain degree before taking the second exam.
Second, it is difficult to expect that real estate brokers with no offices(approximately 76% of all brokers) can constantly update new knowledge for real estate transactions. So it is necessary to institutionalize certification renewal education system.
Third, due to unrealistic academic subjects which real estate brokers have to study, it is not easy to obtain field knowledge of real estate practice. Training academics for specific area of real estate is not satisfactory too. To resolve the problem, only test passers who finished internship in real estate office for certain period of time needs to be allowed to open their own real estate office.