The Dutch government plans to introduce a register of estate agents, along with a complaints desk for buyers and sellers, after an investigation found widespread dissatisfaction with the sector.
In a letter to parliament on Thursday, the housing minister, Elanor Boekholt-O'Sullivan, said the measures followed unsuccessful attempts to get the industry to regulate itself.
"Unfortunately, I must conclude that the professional associations are unable to take the necessary further steps," the D66 minister wrote.
Until 2001, estate agents in the Netherlands had to be licensed, in the manner of lawyers and architects. Since then anyone may use the title. Two trade organisations operate in the sector, and both say they lack the means to deal with agents who behave badly.
"We have consistently said over the past few years that a voluntary approach does not work here. The minister is now drawing the same conclusion," said Tristan Bons, deputy director of the property association Vastgoed Nederland.
Bons said the association has no power to punish anyone, because membership is voluntary and a member facing sanction can simply leave the group.
The government-commissioned survey behind the letter found that nearly a third of respondents had at least one negative experience with an estate agent, and that almost 90 per cent of those complaints involved an agent affiliated with a trade association. Just 2 per cent of people made an official complaint.
In August the homeowners' association Vereniging Eigen Huis said it had received 900 reports between February and July on a dedicated line for problems with estate agents, ranging from buyers feeling pressed to bid beyond their budget to agents favouring some clients over others.
The policy question in front of parliament is therefore a narrow one, and the sector and the ministry have reached the same answer from opposite directions.
It is worth stating the mechanism as the association itself states it. A voluntary body may discipline a member. A member may stop being a member. The disciplinary power therefore reaches exactly those people who are willing to be reached by it, and stops at the precise point where it would begin to matter.
This newspaper considers the position logically unimpeachable. Voluntary self-regulation does not fail at the edges. It functions perfectly, on everyone who consents, for as long as they consent, which is the definition of a service rather than a sanction.
The ministry's remedy should be understood in the same spirit. A register does not raise standards, and nothing in the minister's letter claims that it does. What a register does is make leaving impossible, which is the one structural feature the two associations were missing.
Seen that way, the Netherlands is not replacing self-regulation with state regulation. It is building the country's first professional association that nobody can resign from, and handing it the powers the existing two have always had and never been able to use.
Membership will be compulsory. This is, as far as the Department of Unnecessary Research can establish, the only method yet devised for making membership mean anything at all.