it should be taken further. Why not limit the number of licenses given in a designated geographical area? In a place like LA, allow a certain number, but in Hollywood, Florida, does the consumer need more than 5 licensees to serve a population under 25,000? In my marketplace, there are 27,000 people, and 110 licensees. Granted, many of them work only as the money is needed, but that doesn't serve the public well, as these people are rarely up-to-date on education. The 30 of us who do 95% of the business could easily handle the other 5%, and the public would be far better served. Real Estate is like so many other professions - practise makes perfect. To use a well-worn cliche, would you go to a brain surgeon who does 1 or 2 operations a year, when you could hire a surgeon who does 100 surgerys a year for the same cost? Not likely, and yet consumers put their biggest investment (in most cases) in the hands of someone who often has little experience or education. Term licensing would be great if the typical 'grandfathering was not allowed. Many of the licensees who do little business are people who have been licensed for 15 or more years, before the advent of anything but seller-agency, before there were required courses in real property law, apraisal, and mortgage finance. And these people get to keep their licenses. Hopefully, our recently-introduced mandatory continuing education will eliminate some of these licensees who come flooding out of the woodwork when the market gets hot and steamy. I disagree with the contention that the entry barriers should be kept so that people have the widest choice of licensees to serve them. In Ontario, the law training we receive in our first 2 years of licensing is more than that which a non-real estate lawyer gets in law school. We write very complex legal documents. Any graduate of the real estate education process here is unprepared to write those contracts. It takes practise and experience. Yet those recent graduates are foisted on an un-suspecting consumer the day they receive their license in the mail. These graduates then follow the advice of the people who they work with, many of whom don't do things the right way either. Either out of ignorance or laziness. If the licensing process included more education, with higher entry barriers, in theory we would end up with better qualified licensees to serve the consumer. The economic barrier to higher educational standards should not be taken into consideration. One needs to be able to survive financially for 6 months when one gets one's license; why not raise the stakes and make it even tougher to become licensed? In commercial real estate in Ontario, to work for the big companys, you need a business degree. Many of those companies are getting into the MBA category where they will reimburse salespeople who are successful in getting their MBA. Taking away the emotional component, is commercial real estate really that different from residential real estate? Sure, the expertise required is different, but is there less expertise required in one field over the other? Spoken from my Cannuck perspective.