Have you ever wondered why do the disclosed limited agency agreement or the final agency acknowledgement look the way they do and what harm would there be in writing your own version of those forms to make things a little more clear? The answer to both questions is quite simple but we have to start at the beginning – in Salem, on the “eighteenth day of September in the year of our Lord one thousand eight-hundred and fifty seven, and the independence of the United States the eighty-second,” 52 of the 60 delegates at the Oregon constitutional convention agreed on behalf of their constituencies to the terms of the Constitution of the state of Oregon. This constitution established a legislative branch and invested all “legislative authority” of the state into the House of Representatives and Senate, allowing them to wield “all powers necessary for a branch of the Legislative Department, of a free and independent state” [i.e. the power to make, amend, and repeal laws]. From there, the legislature did so wield that power and did one of the things legislatures do best – they delegated responsibility to an administrative subsection of the state and invested that administrative subsection with the power to handle all those legislative-things that were too burdensome or titchy for the larger “Legislative Department.”
As a result, the legislature created the Oregon Real Estate Agency sometime in 1919 and granted OREA the power to “make and enforce rules as necessary to administer and enforce the provisions of, and enforce and discharge the duties defined in, any law with administration or enforcement of which the agency is charged.” [ORS 696.375(1) is the current numbering for the creation of OREA, and ORS 696.385 is the current house of the rulemaking authority, but the laws came from elsewhere and were renumbered in 1963]. From that point onward, OREA was allowed to handle the various things related to administering, educating, guiding, and punishing real estate licensees. Rulemaking abounded, and OREA did its thing for several decades. In 1957, the Legislature passed the “Administrative Procedures Act” and mandated that the Secretary of State toss all the agency rules into some sort of compiled, centralized location that became known as the “Oregon Administrative Rules.” OREA got assigned chapter 863, and all of its rules were gathered under that chapter and have remained there ever since. Following a relatively gnarly lawsuit in the Midwest, states around the nation adopted disclosure laws, including Oregon in 1993. These disclosure laws included the now-defunct ORS 696.830, which had a somewhat awkward and clunky disclosure for when a party was a buyer agent, seller agent, or seller and buyer agent, and had a “Disclosure Acknowledgement”. In 2001, the clunky ORS 696.830 disclosures and acknowledgements were repealed by the legislature and replaced with a law stating “the Real Estate Commissioner shall prescribe by rule the format and content of an initial agency disclosure pamphlet.”
Therefore, OAR 863-015-0210 was created in 2002, laying out the exact words and format of the Disclosed Limited Agency Agreement and stating that if a person prints out the Disclosed Limited Agency Agreement and uses substantially the same language, the person is in compliance with OREA’s rule on disclosed limited agency. Separately, OAR 863-015-0200 was created by OREA also in 2002, and laid out the exact words of the Final Agency Acknowledgement and stated that if a group printed the acknowledgement in the form found in OAR 863-015-0200(12)(a), they would be in compliance with OREA’s rules. Hence, it gives us the exact form and format of the final agency acknowledgement.
Hence, to answer the question “why do the Disclosed Limited Agency Agreement and Final Agency Acknowledgement look the way they do? The answer is that over the course of about 145 years, Oregonians made Oregon and a legislature, and the legislature made an agency, and the agency made a rule, and the rule made the exact form we use today.