During a recent interview, Arizona Department of Real Estate Commissioner Judy Lowe spoke with Arizona REALTORS® 2018 President Lori Doerfler. Highlights are available on YouTube, below is a text excerpt.

TEAMS WORKGROUP

Lori Doerfler: We know that the Department recently formed a work group focusing on teams and there’s a possibility that a new SPS on teams will be forthcoming. Can you tell us the status of that workgroup?

Judy Lowe: Yes. Our Real Estate Advisory Board made the motion and recommended to the Department that the Department look at our existing statute rules and put together a workgroup that would determine what needed to be stated in a Substantive Policy Statement, an SPS, that would tell teams exactly what is expected of them as they practice the real estate profession from a team environment.

We have chosen our two leaders, Jim Tsighis, “J.T.” from Tucson and Louis Dettorre, our Deputy Commissioner here at the Department of Real Estate will facilitate that work group. It will be a work group that’s already been chosen…very diverse. Most of them will be either team leaders or interact on a regular basis from a DB role or a manager role or in transactions with team leaders and teams.

Looking at what needs to be reminders put into a Substantive Policy Statement for teams to remember as they’re putting together these teams, utilizing the teams as administration of their business model, working under a designated broker as well as a team leader in the office environment.

What do real estate licensees who are not team members need to know about teams and what’s expected of them and how they operate. And then what does the consumer need to know about working within a team that we will be looking at August and September of pulling these individuals together for the workgroup.

Louis has planned it that the first meeting will be maybe a panel of team leaders talking about how they run their business as a team under a designated broker, under a brokerage, educating the entire work group on how that works.

Then some pointers will be developed that will then be brought forward to create and put in place a Substantive Policy Statement that will be distributed throughout all of our membership and licensee base for teams.

We’re really finding that even the public is sometimes at a loss. They’re in a real estate transaction, they worked with one team member, but they’re getting calls from five or six other team members that they have no idea who that individual is or what role they play in the transaction.

Those are the kind of things that need to be talked about as far as teams are concerned.

Lori Doerfler: Great. We should be on the lookout at the end of the year…

Judy Lowe: Yes, by the end of the year. Hopefully, we’ll have that Substantive Policy Statement out with a lot of collaboration going on.


Related resource: NAR 2018 Teams Survey

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