[Snip]  Unless required by law or legislative process, nothing contained in this Letter Agreement or resulting from any financial or other advice provided by LFC may be disclosed to any competitor of LFC, or to any client or potential client of LFC, or to any other party (with the exception of representatives from HUD and authorized third party contractors) in any manner without LFC's prior written approval.

Believe it or not, TREC is actually in place to protect consumers, and we have plenty of legislation to protect them.Back to your earlier point that real estate brokerage isn't competitive, that's not my experience.  

In a residential lease, would not the type of tenancy typically be defined by legislation?   

Hopefully some of the legislation in Congress will get legs after the election and these issues will be fixed.  

In my previous post I was trying to illustrate that some of the items in your initial list were not {closely} related and others were not merely arbitrary regulations or excises forced upon foreign investors, but exist for practical reason and are common business practices {not just in Canada}.Under the residential tenancy act in most provinces, there is a distinction between the "normal" termination of a tenancy at the end of term (Note that in some situations and jurisdictions, only the tenant is afforded the right to decided to terminate the tenancy) and termination with cause - which is commonly achieved through an eviction.The concept of "buying out" the tenant from their lease does occur, but it is a practice typically outside of the legislation (save for situations where the landlord  is entitled to exercise {early} termination - such as taking personal possession of a unit, carrying out significant renovations, or demolishing the property.   

California has legislated themselves into future irrelevancy.

Many of the provisions in the draft legislation are subject to debate, but the EB-5 community across the board pretty much agrees that the provisions increasing the minimum investment amounts from $1m ($500k in a targeted employment area) to $1.2m ($800k in a TEA) are going to make it through.

The lenders felt short-changed, and the justice department agreed with them, as did many key legislators and regulators.So, in your statement, the "extra $15K" probably goes for bail and defense counsel for the defendant (the short-sale flipper, a.k.a. you).To the point of your original question, "How is it possible for the Agent to make money off a short sale?"

Just check your state landlord tenant regulations for the legality it should be clear.Get your landlord pants on and get managing your property by first sitting down and studying your state legislation.

., recent earthquake retrofitting legislation may open doors for you!