Starting Monday, it will be a lot more expensive to be a real estate broker in Colorado.

Blame it on the poor housing market, which has resulted in a 60 percent drop in the number of people applying for real estate licenses, said Erin Toll, director of the Colorado Division of Real Estate.

"This is a huge decline in the market. It's the biggest decline the real estate division has ever seen," Toll said. "We didn't anticipate such a large drop."

What is known as the Broker Original Application fee, for example, is being doubled to $500 from $250.

The Original Subdivision Registration fee has been raised to $4,000 from $1,000, a 300 percent increase.

And to change the name of a real estate company, such as calling it by a different LLC (limited liability corporation), the cost has risen to $1,000 from $200. It also includes new corporation or partnership names.

"That reflects our costs," Toll said. "That takes us a lot of time and staff effort. Some of these LLCs are changing their name four or five times."

Despite the huge percentage increases, the fees are lower in Colorado than in many other states, she said.

The division is cash-funded and does not receive any subsidy or appropriation from the state general fund.

"As a cash-funded agency, statute requires the division to adjust program fees to generate sufficient revenues to cover costs," Toll said in a memo on the agency's Web site.

She said it needs to fund about $4.1 million in costs through fees. Besides fee increases, the division is saving by reducing printing and copying, permitting more employees to telecommute, restricting office supplies, forgoing performance pay salary increases in fiscal 2009-2010 and not filling several vacant positions.

She said it would be a disservice to consumers to keep fees the same and cut staff.

"The number of bad guys out there has no correlation to the numbers of brokers," she said.

And as people are increasingly desperate to sell their homes or face losing them in foreclosure, they can be more vulnerable to scams, she said. Without the fee increases, she said she wouldn't have enough money to complete the biggest investigation she has done into alleged scams in 2006.

The Colorado Association of Realtors, on its Web site, said it was concerned about the timing of the fee increases as housing is at the center of an economic crisis.

But Liz Richards, a broker with Kentwood City Properties, welcomes the increases.

"This is going to weed out the people who are doing real estate on the side and are not so serious about it," she said. "This market is tough. Only the strong will survive. This is going to thin out the herd."