Commercial Investment Real Estate is the magazine of the CCIM Institute, the leading provider of commercial real estate education. CIRE covers market trends, current developments, and business strategies within the commercial real estate field.
Issue link: http://cire.epubxp.com/i/847000
COMMERCIAL INVESTMENT REAL ESTATE 20 July | August 2017 Raising the Bar F or many years, real estate professionals in New Mexico contended with long, tedious, and stale education courses for mandatory continuing education. Complaints and fi lings against real estate licensees ratcheted up, and their errors & omissions insurance providers were in the red. To turn around the state's education, in 2014 the New Mexico Real Estate Commission hired consultant and CCIM Senior Instructor Todd Clarke, CCIM, to review the state's mandatory course and E&O; insurance. His mission was to fi nd out if this turnaround could be achieved through education. "This was a rare chance to change the real estate industry for the better," says Clarke, owner of NM Apartment Advisors in Albuquerque, N.M. His consulting assignment encompassed a survey of nearly 2,000 licensees to fi nd out what they wanted from their real estate education; a review of 1,377 E&O; complaints and fi lings; and an audit of the mandatory course, which had been created 14 years earlier. Changing the Paradigm Clarke's evaluation discovered the eight-hour course was too long and held too infrequently, only once every three years. The training was delivered in a lecture style to the lowest common denominator. While 38 percent of the students chose the course to be taught by a particular instructor, 20 percent selected their course to avoid an instructor. While E&O; insurers were losing money to support their real estate licensees' policies, it appeared most of the complaints involved the basic 10 broker duties. Simply diagnosed, too many New Mexico licensees did not know their broker duties well enough to perform them in compliance with the law. The source of these concerns came back to who taught the classes, what was being taught in the classroom, and how the knowledge was conveyed. "To get back on track, we had to fi nd some new instructors, adapt different train-the-trainers tech- niques for new and existing instructors, and change the course content, with more opportunities for games and interaction among the students," Clarke says. Clarke and his team, including Robin Dyche, CCIM, designed, coordinated, and taught two instructor boot camps, resulting in 36 new instructors. Clarke and Dyche modeled the New Mexico boot camp training on CCIM Institute Instructor Charm School. "I have always believed state education can be better educa- tion," says Dyche, a CCIM instructor and co-owner and broker of CCIM instructor leads transformation of New Mexico's mandatory CE program. by Sara S. Patterson huePhotography/GettyImages CCIM E D U CAT I O N