Increasingly, real estate executives are faced with signing a non-compete agreement when they join a new employer.
The original idea behind non-competes made a lot of business sense. Companies do not want to share “trade secrets” with an employee, only to have that employee take those confidences to a competitor.
However, the terms of those agreements have increasingly been broadened, and their scope has also been expanded to cover lower-level employees who are not familiar with the agreements that are often buried in a stack of employment forms.
The fact of the matter is that employers should be required to fully disclose the terms of a non-compete agreement in plain English to avoid an unsuspecting employee from a deal that they didn’t bargain for.