Got a License? ... Now What?

One of my favorite bloggers Karen Anne Stone posted Realtors Charging a Retainer Fee Up Front. Is it Realistic ?

Besides other things she is amazed with 210 classroom hours needed to get a Real Estate license compared to 1,500 classroom hours to get a beautician’s license. Of course, it is in Texas.

The whole point of comparison is that beautician’s license has more credibility. Well, in Florida salesperson has to sit 63 hours and then a test to get the license, but does that mean that Texas licensees are 3.5 times better prepared? Or that they are 3.5 times slower, and that’s the reason they need more time? Or that Texas Real Estate is 3.5 times more complicated than in Florida?

And what do these hours mean anyway?

Our Florida real estate course book ends with a sample test with 100 questions, and one needs to answer 75 of them to pass.

Test yourself. If you have been licensed for more than 3 years, take the last course book, clean, no marks. If you are salesperson, take this course book, and if you are a broker, take broker’s course book. Go straight to the end and without looking anywhere and Googling anything just do the test.

Let me only say that if anyone would without notice put together 100 most prominent brokers and sales associates (that’s how officially they are called now in Florida) and ask them to do the test, unless they are teaching this stuff, the result most probably would be a 100% one. I mean all of them most probably would fail the test.

As instructors use to say, you need it to get the license. You would know nothing, I repeat, nothing about “doing” real estate, but you need to get your license.

So, for a Floridian it really does not mean much. 63 hours of largely irrelevant material, or 210 hours. The real knowledge starts with post licensing course. This one is geared towards real estate.

Of course, what is not relevant IMO, someone else would think is the most relevant. Try this one, that was on my test quite some time ago (as I remember it):

Who is preparing test questions for licensure?

It was a multiple choice scenario with 4 possible answers, 2 of those could make sense: Florida Real Estate Commission or Department of Business and Professional Regulation.

How freakin important to know…

Should “why do we care” be the best answer?

Not that education is not important, absolutely not. But a situation when you need to answer 75 out of 100 questions correctly only to find out that it has very little to do with what you actually need to do, does not sound encouraging to me.

Wasting more time or wasting less time is not education. It is about getting a license.

I can hear critics saying nice things about 63 hours in Florida, or 210 in Texas…. We all know that real estate is local, and people are all different. Maybe one needs 100 hours, and another one needs 50 hours.

Nope. 63 hours.

Why not base it on performance? If you can answer the test questions with flying colors, why not?

Nope. 63 hours…

BTW, how did you fare with the test? If you are in Florida, and you failed the test, you are in good company.

If you are thinking about entering the profession, it is only 63 hours to the right to get a license and then figure that it gave you very little… and start learning the profession. Really learning…

 * Image courtesy of Anonymous9000 via Flickr.com