The real estate agency agreement can be defined as a written arrangement by which a real estate agency is bound to find a third party that is willing to enter into a contract - the subject of it being real estate, with the principal, and the principal is bound to pay the agency a commission if such contract is successfully concluded. Unlike the classic intermediary relationship, which is governed by mostly discretionary norms of the Obligations Code, the real estate agency agreement is subject to a special regulation - Real Estate Agencies Act, which was introduced in Slovenian law in 2003 in order to protect consumer rights and establish appropriate business standards in real estate agency services. The legislator regulates the content of the contractual relationship of real estate agency in detailed and peremptory manner, explicitly prohibiting real estate agency from certain acts on the one hand, while enumerating a wide range of agency’s obligatory duties, related with security and legal certainty within real estate transactions, on the other. A significantly wider range of contractual obligations in combination with their mandatory nature raises the level of security in the real estate market, and at the same time distances the function of the real estate agency and its agents from traditional intermediation services and the general regulation of intermediary agreement.
As long as the interference with the fundamental principle of contractual freedom seems appropriate and justifiable within the relationship between the real estate agency as a business entity and the principal as a consumer, it is more difficult from a legal standpoint, to defend individual provisions of the Real Estate Agencies Act, which regulate contractual relations between equivalent subjects in the real estate market in a mandatory (peremptory) manner.
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