Commercial Investment Real Estate July/August 2017 | Page 22

CCIM
EDUCATION
Raising the Bar
CCIM instructor leads transformation of New Mexico’s
mandatory CE program.
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.
F
Changing the Paradigm
Clarke’s evaluation discovered the eight-hour course was too
long and held too infrequently, only once every three years. The
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July | August 2017
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
COMMERCIAL INVESTMENT REAL ESTATE
by Sara S. Patterson