Owners spared of training course

Elected board members do not need to undergo the course offered by the Dubai Real Estate Institute


Dubai: Pay heed, interim board members. Upon registration of your building's owners' association (OA) with the Real Estate Regulatory Agency (Rera), elected board members are no longer obliged to undergo the Dh3,000-worth five-day training course offered by the Dubai Real Estate Institute. The onus has, instead, passed on to association managers.

Though Rera's earlier mandate required board members to complete the training course and obtain a certificate of good conduct from the Dubai Police, the regulatory body soon realised this could be impractical. Most interim board members find the Rera-certified course financially cumbersome, especially because they serve in a voluntary capacity.

"It's not mandatory for the board members to do the course. The association manager must take the course, have the specific licence and be registered with the Rera," says Mohammad Khalifa Bin Hammad, head, Real Estate Relations Management, Rera. He adds that 161 OAs have been registered at the Rera so far.

Most interim board members Property spoke to were unaware of the change in requirements. "We were asked to submit our passport and visa copies recently as part of the pre-registration process," says Iona Stanley, interim board member, The Palladium, JLT.

According to Mohammad Nafees, member of The Meadows 1 & 2 interim owners' association, "All the details about the members have to be submitted to Rera, which is the final authority to accept or reject a board member. We need to convince unit owners to become interim board members since it is a voluntary job sans compensation."

The board can either hire an association manager who is a unit owner within the jointly-owned property and granted permission by Rera to manage the OA; or enter into a contract with an OA management company, which is registered and licensed with Rera.

However, well-entrenched association managers argue that the OA course alone is insufficient to perform the complex roles required of a building manager. Says Nima Khanpour, commercial director, Stratum, an OA management company, "You cannot expect a practically inexperienced association manager to be adequately qualified by just obtaining his/her OA certificate from Rera. The necessary skills for association management come from years of experience under the supervision of an experienced association manager, who trains the novice manager to understand the inter-relationships between all components of a building."

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