At the end of the day, how will the new Illinois licensing requirements impact IAR membership levels?
The minute the clock struck midnight early this morning, all broker and salesperson licenses expired in Illinois and new rules officially began covering who could practice real estate in the land of Lincoln and what requirements they needed to fulfill to do so.
According to the Illinois Association of Realtors, though, we may have to wait a few weeks for the dust to settle and reveal how many agents were unable to meet the new requirements before the May 1 deadline.
Jon Broadbooks is the director of communications for IAR, and he said in an e-mail to Chicago Agent that thousands of membership applications are floating in snail mail space at the moment.
“As of today, we have 38,434 members,” he began. “30,700 have transitioned that we know about. I emphasize this because we know that IDFPR is processing thousands of applications that flooded in during the final weeks before the transition deadline.”
Because applications needed to be postmarked by April 30, many agents waited until the last minute to send the IAR their information. Broadbooks said that for certain segments of the industry, the effects are particularly notable.
“For example, we know that we have 7,433 sales-broker members that are unaccounted for,” he said. “But, 1,822 of them took proficiency, so it’s likely that they submitted the paperwork by the deadline but just haven’t shown up on the official tallies, yet. By the same token, there are 2,597 on the managing broker side unaccounted for, but we know 474 took the proficiency exam. Again, they likely turned in the paperwork but haven’t shown up yet.”
So how long will it take to gain a reasonable understanding of the new licensing requirement’s impact? According to the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation personnel that Broadbooks contacted, some time.
“IDFPR has told us that it could take some weeks for us to truly know where the numbers will settle out,” Broadbooks said. “The agency has told us they hired temporary workers to deal with the backlog, but there are tubs of applications that are being processed at this point.”
In our story yesterday on the deadline, Marki Lemons, an agent with Keller Williams and trainer through the Chicago Association of Realtors, said the decline in Chicago’s numbers could be as high as 20 percent. Could IAR’s be higher? lower? the same? Stay tuned!