Real Estate Professionals E&O Insurance in South Carolina

South Carolina at a glance

Primary regulator

South Carolina Real Estate Commission

Operates within the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation.

Disclosure statute

Disclosure of Brokerage Relationships, S.C. Code §40-57-370

Requires delivery at first substantive contact and an acknowledgment in the agency agreement and sales contract.

Oversight tool

Periodic office inspections under §40-57-60(C)

Commission inspectors review trust-account and general compliance practices in person.

Property disclosure form

Residential Property Condition Disclosure Statement, effective June 2023

A separate compliance track from the brokerage-relationship disclosure.

Disclosure of Brokerage Relationships and the presumption of customer status

Section 40-57-370 presumes that a potential buyer or seller is a customer of the firm, served through transaction-broker duties, until that person signs a written agency representation agreement, which means the disclosure form's job is to make that default status and the alternative clearly understood before substantive contact deepens. If first substantive contact happens by phone or another electronic channel, the statute has specific timing rules for when the written disclosure must still follow, and a firm's phone-lead intake script needs to route that delivery correctly rather than treating an online inquiry as informal.

Statutory basic duties owed to customers

Even a person who remains a customer rather than a client is owed specific statutory duties: timely presentation of offers, accounting for money or property received, an explanation of the scope of services, honesty and fair dealing, and disclosure of adverse material facts the licensee actually knows. A licensee who treats an unrepresented walk-in buyer as owed no obligations at all misunderstands South Carolina law, since these customer-level duties apply regardless of whether any agency agreement is ever signed.

Periodic Commission office inspections

Under S.C. Code §40-57-60(C), the Commission conducts periodic inspections of licensee offices to check trust-account practices and general compliance, and licensees contacted by an inspector are required to respond promptly and cooperate. A brokerage's escrow recordkeeping and required contract-language compliance are exactly what an inspector reviews, so gaps that might otherwise surface only after a consumer complaint can instead be caught, or missed, during a routine inspection cycle.

Broker-in-charge supervision and residential condition disclosure

South Carolina requires a Broker-in-Charge to supervise associated licensees and approve the forms used in the office, and the state's separate Residential Property Condition Disclosure Statement, revised effective June 2023, sits alongside the brokerage-relationship disclosure as a distinct compliance track for sale transactions. A Broker-in-Charge who has not updated office practice to the 2023 disclosure revision, or who lets agents mix outdated and current forms, creates a documentation gap that becomes visible only once a transaction is challenged.

Who we write this for in South Carolina

Real estate E&O FAQs for South Carolina