Real estate companies (including letting) and other property operators have an obligation in accordance with the Act on Preventing Money Laundering to identify their customers and their representatives. From the perspective of real estate and letting agencies, this information is of course essential and necessary when a customer relationship is formed and maintained.

The Federation of Real Estate Agency and the Regional State Administrative Agency have both given their own sector-specific instructions on how to fulfil the obligations for the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing.

Estate agencies are obliged to verify the identity of their customers, investigate their political influence (PEP), produce customer-specific risk assessments and check if their customers are included on sanctions or asset freezing lists. Furthermore, the beneficial owners must be investigated in the case of corporate customers. Customer due diligence data must be kept up to date; in other words, the data must be regularly updated.

All the above-mentioned measures are easy to take care of using the automated DOKS service, which also saves your and your customers’ time. You can focus your resources on the essential operations whilst ensuring that the obligations of the Act on Preventing Money Laundering are attended to and up to date. Using the service, it is easy to identify the opponent/buyer, which is an added obligation for an agent in the real estate sector.

You can also use the service for organising agreements, powers of attorney or any other kind of documents requiring customer signatures. The electronic signature function is particularly convenient when customers are geographically far apart, such as estates. With an electronic signature, the heirs of an estate can authorise a person to manage the matters for them. Using the secure email function, documents which include sensitive information (e.g., bill of sale, deed of inventory) can be sent securely to the other party, thus, taking care of the requirements of data security.