The Alabama Real Estate Commission (AREC) met twice the third full week of April, once for a strategic planning session and once for its monthly meeting. The strategic planning session has traditionally preceded the Commission’s adoption of a new five-year strategic plan, due to the upcoming expiration of the current plan. The monthly meeting followed a regular agenda with updates, commissioner discussion, and hearings. Continue reading for some highlights from the meeting.

In recent history, AREC adopts a new strategic plan every five years, including core statements and goals. To accomplish this task, AREC first holds a strategic planning session. The nearly day-long meeting saw commissioners and staff meet together and brainstorm strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats – called a SWOT analysis. Overall, the major themes of the meeting were a focus on consumers, education of instructors and licensees, and praise for AREC’s staff. Looking back to the meeting in August 2018, similar subjects were covered with the exception of this year’s discussion on consumer protection.

At the regularly called meeting on the April 21, commissioners heard updates from staff, voted to certify a rule amendment, considered a request to delay the requirements for virtual education, and conducted a large number of hearings. Updated licensee numbers provided to commissioners show continued growth in the industry, with over 650 new licenses issued in March. This amounts to over 11 new licensees a day.

In 2021, commissioners voted to require ARELLO certification for all educators who want to teach virtual courses, with each course requiring certification. The effective date of the requirement was delayed several times with the final deadline scheduled to end April 30, 2022. However, after receiving several requests to further delay the requirement, commissioners decided to push the deadline back to September 30, 2022, with the caveat that educators wishing to provide virtual courses submit a plan for certification to AREC by May 30.

Commissioners also decided to certify a rule amendment changing continuing education requirements for associate and qualifying brokers. Reported in the article on the February AREC meeting, the rule amendment will require brokers to obtain three continuing education (CE) hours in a commission-approved qualifying broker course. Brokers will still only need to receive 15 hours in CE, but now, instead of 12 elective CEs, brokers will take nine elective CEs, the already required three-hour risk management course, and the three-hour broker course.

The hearing docket was full with nine complaints (seven for bad checks), six applications for a determination of eligibility for a salesperson license, three applications for a salesperson’s temporary license, one request to hold a license after a prior revocation, and one request for an extension to the deadline to apply for a salesperson’s license. Commissioners altered hearings this month by deliberating over the cases in executive session and then voting in an open meeting.

The Commission’s next meetings will occur on May 19 and June 23 at 9 am in Montgomery. Tune in live here to view the meeting.