FREMONT — They’re the silent scourge of Fremont — open house signs that clutter street corners and sidewalks every weekend, sometimes before dawn and well into the evening hours.

Now, after years of hearing residents complain, city officials plan to clamp down on real estate agents who plant the signs in strategic locations to get a leg up on the competition.

“It’s out of control,” Fremont Councilman Raj Salwan said. “To be the big guy in town, you’ve got to have a million signs, that’s what’s happening.”

Although the city has its share of anti-blight rules, when it comes to open house signs it might as well be the Wild West.

There are no rules limiting the number of signs a real estate agent can put up, and officials say a few of them are taking advantage of the vacuum. The result has been a house-marketing arms race of sorts, with some agents calling out others for making them look bad.

“Maybe we should have done this before, but now we’re doing it,” Wayne Morris, Fremont’s deputy community development director, said about the city’s plan to expand and enforce its sign regulations to tackle the problem.

Morris said the city likely will limit the number of signs allowed per intersection and per for-sale parcel, set a maximum distance between a sign and home, and establish rules to keep signs away from historic buildings such as Mission San Jose.

“You look at historic Mission San Jose, it’s terrible, the whole intersection is littered with signs,” Salwan said. “You’ve got this historic, beautiful thing, and then you’ve got all these signs in the front blocking the sidewalk.”

The city currently mandates that open house signs can only go up for five hours starting from noon on weekends and must not block sidewalks.

But a handful of realtors repeatedly break even those rules, which has led to the city issuing roughly $32,000 in fines between October 2018 and October 2019 and confiscating some signs until the debt is paid.

“This just seems to be a Fremont thing,” said David Stark, a spokesman for the Bay East Association of Realtors.

“We don’t have the chronic violations, we don’t receive the chronic complaints in other East Bay cities,” he said, noting several of those cities restrict the total number of signs that can be placed.

Fremont’s elected officials say residents have been complaining for years about the proliferation of signs considered a blight to their neighborhoods.

In some cases, city staff reports say open house signs put out by realtors don’t even lead to any home for sale, but are instead being used for “general marketing.”

And it’s not just residents who are upset; other realtors are peeved too.

Staff reports say “a significant amount of the real estate sign complaints received are from realtors ‘blowing the whistle’ on other realtors because they feel they’re losing a competitive advantage.

“The heartburn within the realtor community about the sign issues in Fremont has been … a handful of agents that aren’t following the rules,” Stark said.

Timothy Crofton, a prominent Fremont realtor, readily acknowledged he’s received roughly $30,000 in sign violation fines from the city over the last year.

A key to his business plan is to “pepper the city” with open house signs each weekend, Crofton said. “I do an average of 10 per house, so we average around 100 signs per week, and during the summertime, we can bump it up to 200 if I have twice as many listings.”

If the city chooses to limit the number of signs that go up, Crofton said that would unfairly target him and his successful business.

“Other agents get jealous, because people keep talking about ‘Timothy is doing great.’ Well, you know, thank god Timothy is doing great. But Timothy has worked his butt off, and I spend $450,000 a year in marketing,” he said.

Crofton said he hires help to start putting out signs around 6 a.m. every weekend, before the city allows them to be out, because it’s safer to do so at that time with the lighter traffic.

“We dominate. We dominate the listings in Fremont. And they would love to see that end,” he said of other real estate agents and brokers.

“I would like to say it nicely, but that is exactly the case,” he said.

Morris insists the city is trying to be even-handed in its approach to new sign rules.

“We’re just trying to have a level playing field with everybody,” he said. “It just doesn’t mean that because you’re the most successful you don’t have to follow the law or follow the rules.”

Mattie Wei, a realtor in Fremont who has also received some city-issued fines for misplaced signs, empathizes with residents who think the signs can be a “nuisance,” but said she has no choice but to put up about 20 per home to compete with other realtors who are placing dozens more.

“Our listings are next to each other, and if I place five signs, what do you think my seller will say to me? ‘Mattie, you don’t have enough signs,’” she said.

After a City Council discussion on the issue earlier this month, Morris said he plans to have some new proposed rules for its review in February.

While city code enforcement officers have done some periodic weekend enforcement of current rules over the past year, Morris said their schedules may be modified to provide more consistent patrols.

“We’re hearing from the majority of the realtors that they want to follow the rules,” Morris said.

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Affordable homes, some for the homeless, eyed near San Jose malls “We have real estate professionals who are very proud of the job they do representing their clients and they see these illegally placed signs as a negative stain on the reputation of real estate professionals,” Stark said.

He said the association plans to continue educating realtors about local rules and support Fremont in its efforts to address the issue with new restrictions.

“This is a unique situation where we’re really welcoming more regulation,” Stark said, “because we believe that everyone is ultimately going to benefit from better rules and more consistent enforcement of those rules.”