Armenia Approves the Exam Rules Realtors Must Pass to Broker Legally

The examining body is a qualification committee established by the Cadastre Committee, which is the authorised state governing body for Armenia's real estate sector. Its membership is mixed rather than purely official: specialists from the Cadastre Committee itself, representatives of the Ministry of Finance, independent experts, and representatives of self-regulatory organisations. Decisions are taken by a majority of the members attending. Candidates may appeal exam results under procedures and deadlines set out in the rules.

The resolution also builds in a conflict-of-interest bar. Committee members cannot directly or indirectly take part in preparing candidates for the exam, and cannot be associated with the submission of particular qualification applications. That matters in a small market where the people qualified to examine brokers overlap heavily with those who would otherwise train them.

What the 1 October procedure does not settle matters just as much. The reported text does not specify exam fees, penalties for brokering without a certificate, how many of Armenia's working agents are affected, or a transition window for uncertified brokers. A buyer should not assume every agent encountered in the coming months is already certified.

The mechanism

This is secondary legislation, a Cabinet resolution filling out a primary statute, the normal route in Armenia for the operational detail of a licensing regime. That shapes how the next change arrives: because the exam rules sit in a government decision rather than in the law itself, the committee's composition, the eligibility criteria and the appeal deadlines can be revised by another Cabinet decision without going back to the National Assembly. Expect the detail to move faster than the statute.

The Cadastre Committee also authored the underlying policy. It submitted the brokerage bill and now administers the exam that gates entry to the profession, concentrating rule-making and gatekeeping in the same agency that runs the property register.

Context

Armenia had no licensing regime for real estate agents until this legislative push. When the Cadastre Committee submitted its brokerage bill in 2025, officials described a sector in which thousands of brokers worked informally and outside the tax system. As reported at the time, the draft would require brokers and agencies to enter a state registry before operating, to use a centralised online system recording every transaction, to sign written client contracts and enter the details into that platform, and to pay an annual state fee of roughly 1,200 US dollars for access. Administrative fines were envisaged for breaches, without published amounts.

Foreign buyers can own apartments and buildings in Armenia on broadly the same terms as citizens, with land the significant exception, so the agent and the paperwork have always carried more of the risk in an Armenian purchase than ownership eligibility does. A certificate a buyer can check changes the shape of that risk, and it follows a regional pattern of routing property transactions through official channels rather than leaving them to private arrangement, as with Turkey's move to make its secure payment system mandatory for property sales. In neighbouring Georgia agent conduct is still largely unregulated, a contrast set out in what foreign buyers need to know about Georgian real estate scams and in the legal guide to foreign ownership in Georgia.

Sources

- In Armenia, realtors are required to pass an exam and obtain a professional certificate to legally conduct brokerage activities, Finport.am, 1 October 2026

- Armenia moves to regulate real estate agents with licensing, fines, and mandatory tax compliance, CivilNet

- New Rules for Working With Real Estate Agents in Armenia, Armenian Lawyer