A post about someone offering legal services for annulment cases is making rounds in the FB universe.

The person asked how much it takes to get an annulment and “Anna online assistance” went on explaining the “process”, fees, and “requarmence”.

Anna online assistance explained that all she needed was an authorization letter for the “cenomat” (sic: CENOMAR) and marriage contract, valid ID, and a copy of the marriage contract and voila, you can surely get annulled.

The person asking became suspicious when Anna said that her office is at the PSA, which the person thought stands for Prostate-Specific Antigen Test.

The person kept asking Anna questions until Anna finally gave up and told the person to just find a lawyer.

It’s a funny story, but if we think about it many of us are like the person asking Anna.

We want quick solutions to our problems and we usually want cheap ones that we’re sometimes willing to go to people who promise to make all our problems go away even if they sound or look suspicious.

We spend half of what we’re supposed to, thinking that we were able to save money in the process, but actually end up losing all that we paid.

It’s the same story with many real estate transactions in the Philippines. Sellers approach their relatives, friends, neighbors – all unlicensed individuals, to handle transactions for them only to find out later that the relative already sold the property to a third person, the friend lost the original documents, or the neighbor vanished together with the proceeds of the sale.

This doesn’t have to happen to any of us, and in fact we can avoid this from happening if we only choose the right people to handle the transactions for us.

As Ana pointed out above, we need lawyers, and not Ana for annulment cases.

In the case of real estate transactions, we need to deal with licensed real estate brokers.

Of course, there may be unscrupulous brokers as much as there are also unscrupulous lawyers, but dealing with licensed professionals gives us comfort that it’s easier to go after these people just in case.