December 6, 2020
Garden State Real Estate Academy is New Jersey’s top-rated real estate school for helping people get a NJ real estate licensing. But we also offer dozens of live and online continuing education CE classes. The New Jersey Real Estate License Law requires every real estate agent and broker (except for referral agents) to renew their real estate licenses by June 30th of each odd-numbered year. To do so, they much have completed at least 12 hours of approved continuing education, of which six must be in “core” subjects and of those core topics, at least two hours must be in ethics.
While June 30th is the statutory deadline for completing your CE, the real estate commission imposes a $200 fee on licensees who do not take their classes by April 30th.
With the deadline just four months away, we will dedicate one or more of our blog messages each month to examining one of those CE classes. The reason is to not only to meet a mandatory CE requirement, but more importantly, to suggest CE classes that will be genuinely interesting and helpful in your real estate career.
Best of all, whichever class you take via our online partnership with The CE Shop booked here, you will get a HUGE discount when you book it at https://tinyurl.com/y4elvm5n
Agency.
In our pre-licensing classes, when we teach people how to pass their state exam to earn a New Jersey real estate license, one of the areas in which students have the most difficulty is “agency.” The CE course we’ll focus on today, AAA All About Agency is a comprehensive six-hour class, all of which is a “core” topic.
Agency can sometimes seem to be a boring subject—or at least, it is often taught that way!
But not this one.
What is “Agency”?
Agency is a concept that goes back thousands of years. It is based on the premise that a person (the Principal) can choose a person (the Agent) to act on the principal’s behalf with the confidence that the agent will always put the principal’s interests above all others, including the agent’s own interests.
In real estate, agency is at the very heart of what we do. When we work as an agent for a broker, that broker is our principal and we owe that broker loyalty, obedience and commitment. Similarly, when clients retain brokers to help them buy, sell, or rent property, those clients are our principals and we their agents. As such, we owe them a fiduciary duty of obedience, loyalty, disclosure, confidentiality, accountability, and reasonable care.
The “AAA All About Agency” class.
Whether you are a long-time real estate practitioner or a newly licensed agent, you will find this course instructive and interesting. It explains the duties agents have to their brokers, their clients and their customers. It covers disclosure: what we must disclose, what we may disclose and what we must not disclose.
In the words of the course description, the highlights include:
- Agency-client relationships; the difference between a client and a customer, and how agency relationships are created;
- Agency definitions and an agent’s fiduciary duties;
- Types of agency relationships;
- The importance of agency disclosure;
- Agency considerations in the context of property management;
- The importance of safeguarding client funds and confidential information;
- Buyer agency and of seller agency;
- Activities and scenarios to reinforce key concepts.
The course is broken into several easily-manageable sections, so there is no need to imagine having to sit through a six-hour course without a break. There are scenarios that make the points appear relevant to our everyday practice of real estate, with questions throughout the course, plus quizzes and a final exam.
Garden State Real Estate Academy offers classes that begin every two weeks for those interested in earning their New Jersey real estate license and we also offer classes for established agents seeking their New Jersey broker license approved education courses. All those courses are taught LIVE by our instructors and are currently delivered via Zoom. Google shows our graduates rate Garden State as New Jersey’s top-ranked real estate school. We also offer pre-licensing online for more than 30 states at discounted rates through our affiliation with The CE Shop. You can find that information here: https://tinyurl.com/yyj8kcfd
David C. Forward is a licensed real estate broker and instructor and was first licensed as a Realtor® 32 years ago. During his career, David and his business partner sold more than 500 homes in South Jersey. He is now School Director of Garden Real Estate Academy, has won numerous awards for real estate sales, is a much-requested public speaker who has addressed audiences on six continents and is the author of 16 books.
