Vancouver property manager was not licensed, must pay regulator $25K in penalties

A man and woman, centre, stand on the balcony of a condo unit surrounded by other condominium towers in Yaletown in Vancouver, B.C., on Monday, Sept. 14, 2015. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck)

A B.C. real estate agent and her company have been ordered to pay more than $25,000 after she admitted to providing rental property management services without being licensed to do so and advertising her services under a potentially misleading name.

Melissa Safe proposed a consent order to the B.C. Financial Services Authority in response to allegations brought against her by a complainant whose rental property she had managed.

The BCFSA accepted the proposal and published the document on its website last week.

In the consent order, Safe admits that she helped her former client purchase a property in Vancouver in October 2017, then began serving as the client’s rental property manager the following month.

At the time, Safe was licensed as a “trade services representative” – a real estate agent – under the provincial Real Estate Services Act. She was not licensed as a property manager under the act, nor did she inform the real estate brokerage for which she worked about her property management activities.

Safe continued managing the property for her client through August 2021, changing brokerages multiple times during that period, but never informing her managing brokers about the rental property, according to the consent order.

The document indicates that Safe became licensed for both trade services and rental property management in March 2019, and has been ever since, with the exception of a one-week span at the start of April 2020.

The consent order also covers an apparently unrelated issue, in which the BCFSA sent Safe a letter in February 2023 advising her that her use of the names “SafeRent” and “Safe Real Estate” – rather than the name of her related brokerage – on her website violated the regulator’s advertising rules.

She continued to use those names on her website until “at least August 2023,” according to the document.

Providing rental property management services “for or in expectation of remuneration” without a licence to do so is misconduct, as is providing such services and receiving such payments outside of a licensee’s related brokerage.

Other misconduct Safe committed, according to the consent order, included inadvertently delaying the transfer of a rent payment to her client in January 2020, failing to provide her client with monthly rental reports and refusing to do so when those reports were requested, and failing to provide some of the information requested by BCFSA investigators in response to the complaint against her.

For all of this misconduct, Safe and her personal real estate corporation agreed to pay a discipline penalty of $20,000 within six months, plus an additional penalty of $4,920 within three months.

They also agreed to pay $2,000 to the BCFSA for its enforcement expenses within two months, and Safe agreed to complete the Rental Property Management Remedial Education Course at UBC’s Sauder School of Business.