For many real estate professionals, property management is a natural extension of their expertise. Whether you’re thinking about taking on your first property or looking to grow your property management business, this is a niche business requiring specialized skills and knowledge.

Explore the role of the property manager, common tenant issues, and federal laws.

Course highlights include:

• Property management contracts
• Property types and evaluating factors
• Tips for building a successful working relationship with property owners
• Landlord and tenant obligations
• Tips for screening and retaining tenants
• Informal rental agreements and the risks involved
• How to deal with delinquent tenants
• Fair housing guidelines and exemptions

Whether you're representing a seller who's listing a high-efficiency home or working with a buyer to find one, it's important to be able to recognize a home's green features and the value they bring to the property. This means understanding the benefit of big-ticket green items such as solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal heating and cooling systems, solar water heaters, or even energy-efficient windows, as well as knowing the value in quick-and-easy updates like low-flow faucets, LED lighting, and smart thermostats. It also means knowing the difference between HERS and HES and SEER and LEED. Of course, greening up a home isn't cheap. Letting your clients know about available federal and state programs and incentives is another way you can ensure your clients are getting the best service around.

Course highlights include:

• An overview of the green home movement
• Green terminology, certifications, and ratings
• A review of energy-efficient upgrades, including solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal heating and cooling systems, solar water heaters, and more
• Tips for assisting green homebuyers and sellers
• A review of the FHA's Energy Efficient Mortgage and the 203(k) Rehabilitation Mortgage programs
• Qualifications for the DOE's Weatherization Assistance Program
• Interactive activities and scenarios to seal in the new information and frame it in everyday context

Real estate professionals wear many hats: expert communicator, attentive listener, trustworthy confidant, obedient servant, loyal advocate, and knowledgeable educator, to name just a few. To juggle these roles effectively—and within the lines of the law—licensees must remain informed. Real estate professionals are in a position to provide an invaluable level of consumer protection as they support consumers through their real estate transactions.

This course explores licensees' role as advocate and educator, and how they can protect consumers and their business from the threats of antitrust and fair housing violations and predatory lending. We'll start by looking at what federal protections are in place to combat these unfair practices. We'll also provide the steps you can proactively take to protect the consumers you work with day in and day out and the business you've worked so hard to create.

Course highlights include:

• Federal antitrust laws and violations
• Avoiding antitrust violations and protecting consumers from them
• Antitrust complaint process and penalties
• Federal fair housing laws and violations
• Redlining, blockbusting, and steering
• Buyer love letters
• Fair housing complaint process and penalties
• Predatory lending
• Truth in Lending Act
• Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act
• Protecting consumers from predatory lending
• Reporting predatory lending

Agency is integral to your role in representing your clients. It's a beautiful, symbiotic relationship. When it works.

In this course we’ll discuss situations where agency can go wrong. Violations of agency duties (negligence, misrepresentation, and breaches of fiduciary duty) comprise the vast majority of claims against errors and omissions insurance policies. The same holds true for civil actions brought against real estate licensees by the public. 

The DOS publishes online the negotiated settlements when a licensed New York state broker or salesperson has violated state licensing law. This section is designed to help you understand the types of violations that occur and how to keep yourself off that list.

Course highlights:

• Buying your own listing
• Undisclosed relationships
• Conflict of interest
• Misrepresentation types
• Antitrust violations
• Activities and scenarios to reinforce key concepts

New York’s Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act was a game-changer for the state’s landlord-tenant laws. The act introduced sweeping reforms, producing a wide range of details to unpack. What were the main takeaways that impact how you work with landlord and tenant clients?

This one-hour course provides an overview of the act’s many updates that impact the real estate profession, helping you understand what the changes were and their applicability in everyday practice. Additionally, you’ll review how to stay within the scope of your real estate expertise. This is especially relevant with this act’s updates, because landlords and tenants may ask for advice that qualifies as legal counsel concerning how to interpret and comply with the new laws.

With practical knowledge concerning these legal updates, you’ll be better equipped to provide clients and consumers a higher level of professional servicing, helping them navigate their real estate transactions, and knowing when to advise them to seek legal, tax, and financial expertise.

Course highlights include:

• Purpose of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act
• Proponents and opponents of the landlord-tenant law reform
• Background information on the state’s two rent regulation programs
• A step-by-step breakdown of the various parts that comprise the act
• Highlights of eliminated sections of the former landlord-tenant laws, impacting luxury deregulation and other provisions
• Overview of additions to the landlord-tenant laws, including changes to preferential rent and other new guidelines
• Amendments to the landlord-tenant laws, such as how owner-use recovery may be utilized, and changes to the improvement provisions
• Activities and scenarios to reinforce key concepts

While conducting real estate business, have you encountered a situation in which you weren’t sure what the proper course of action was? What the right thing to do might be? Or maybe you’ve heard your colleagues’ stories and got that uncomfortable, itchy feeling that an action they took wasn’t quite on the up and up.

Let’s look at an uncomfortable truth: real estate agents have a small tarnished image problem. With every transaction being unique, real estate licensees often face ethical gray areas. Some real estate professionals simply don’t understand how to handle complex issues in the most ethical manner, and others bend the rules if they think it’ll keep a transaction on track or a commission in their bank account and not a competitor’s.

Aligned to the requirements of the current NAR cycle, this three-hour course helps licensees deepen their knowledge—and practice—of ethical rules of conduct according to the National Association of REALTORS® Code of Ethics & Standards of Practice. The code isn’t applicable to REALTORS® only, who are duty-bound to uphold the code as a privilege of membership. The code’s guidance serves anyone possessing a real estate license, and licensees who heed the code’s various articles and standards of practice can do the greatest good of all: protecting consumers while also bolstering the reputation of all the industry’s professionals.

Course highlights include:

• Laws vs. morals vs. ethics
• Top articles of the code involved in the most complaints (plus a few more)
• A candid look at the industry’s image problem
• Common ethical dilemmas and using the code to solve them
• Foundation and enforcement of the code
• Competency in real estate practice as a matter of ethics
• Steering clear of procuring cause disputes
• Ethics concerns with technology and social media
• Tips and best practices to keep your reputation polished to a high shine

*This course was designed by us to meet the REALTOR® Code of Ethics Training Requirement. Please confirm that your local association, who administers the Code of Ethics training, will accept this course.

In this course, you’ll learn about the history of housing discrimination and its lasting impact in order to better understand why fair housing laws are necessary. You’ll review the federal laws that provide protection against housing discrimination and what actions are prohibited and required by these laws in the business of real estate. This will include reviewing the personal characteristics—race, color, religion, national origin, sex, familial status, and disability--that federal law protects from discrimination in housing. Besides these federal protections, there are state and local government fair housing laws that protect additional personal characteristics from discrimination in housing and you’ll find out where to get more fair housing information for your clients.

You’ll also learn some best practices for fair housing marketing and some strategies to avoid steering and making assumptions based on stereotypes. You’ll role play some scenarios to practice interrupting any implicit biases so that consumers are treated with equal concern, respect, and fairness. By allowing consumers to choose which communities/neighborhoods they want to live in, you can do your part to uphold fair housing laws and end housing discrimination.

This course was designed to meet the REALTOR® Fair Housing Training Requirement. Please confirm that your local association, who administers the Fair Housing training, will accept this course.

Ethnic and racial diversity is increasing faster than experts previously predicted, based on U.S. Census Bureau data. As of the 2020 Census, nearly 40% of Americans identify with a non-white race or ethnic group. With increasing diversity comes an increasing need for real estate professionals—who work with members of the public every day—to develop and practice cultural competence, and to know how to demonstrate the utmost professionalism with consumers of varied backgrounds.

This two-hour course emphasizes the importance of fair housing and embracing cultural diversity, as well as national and state demographics, before exploring tips and best practices for being culturally sensitive and showcasing professionalism at all times.

Course highlights include:

• Serving diverse population needs
• Federal and state homeownership demographics and diversity
• Cultural sensitivity
• Recognizing your own bias
• Working with and celebrating diversity
• Building rapport with diverse clients
• Active listening and effective communication
• Diversity resources

Implicit bias—the unconscious attitudes and stereotypes that impact our actions and decisions—can be a controversial and confusing subject. However, as a 2019 Newsday Long Island real estate exposé revealed, implicit bias can have a significant impact on real estate professionals’ interactions with consumers. With this in mind, the New York Department of Licensing Services mandated this two-hour course to make licensees aware of what implicit bias is, explain how to recognize it in themselves, and understand the illegal and immoral impact it has on the public.

This course explores the roots of implicit bias in government-sanctioned practices such as redlining and blockbusting, then shows licensees how to recognize their own implicit biases, as well as disparate impact and treatment.

Course highlights include:

• Redlining’s history in the U.S.
• Suburban development and racial disparities
• The Fair Housing Act
• The protected classes
• Recognizing implicit bias
• The Long Island Newsday report
• Disparate treatment and disparate impact