How to become an Associate Broker in New York State

The following is an overview of the process required to become an Associate Broker in New York state. This overview assumes you have already been a licensed real estate agent for at least two years with enough deals behind you, and you are ready to take the steps needed to become an Associate Broker.

Training:

If you received your real estate salesperson license with 75 of hours of training, the broker classes require an additional 45 hours of training (the total hours required is 120). Training covers categories such as disclosure rules, license law, broker office requirements, real estate finance, real estate investments, business law, construction and development, property conveyance, property management, taxes and assessments, and environmental issues. You may choose to take face-to-face training or obtain your training online. There are advantages and disadvantages of each.

• The “live” training gives you the chance to interact with your peers and to ask questions or spend more/less time on a particular subject. Of course, 45 hours may require that you take a solid week off of work which may or may not be possible. Also, classes may not be held frequently enough, or close enough to your home.
• The online training provides flexibility to complete classes around your work and personal schedule. However, online courses can have a few glitches, and they are timed so they may be slower than you like. There is also no “live” question and answer period. And no networking opportunities either.

Testing:

Regardless of the type of training you choose to take, at the end of the course you will need to take a course-related test. This first test is very similar to the formal New York state test but it is usually given at the training facility or other local building. A passing grade is a 70 and you must pass the test before you will be able to get credit for the training.

Once you have successfully passed this first test, you will need to sign up to take the official New York State broker test. There are multiple locations for test taking in New York and information on test locations and times, as well as the tool for scheduling appointments are available at eAccessNY. Make sure to pick a place that will allow you to arrive early. The official test consists of 100 multiple choice questions and again, a 70 is a passing score. The pass/fail test results are available at eAccessNY and should be available within a few weeks of the completion of the test.

Applying for the license:

Once you have passed the state test, it is time to complete the application. You must fill out the formal paperwork which can be found at the Department of State website. Your sponsoring broker will need to sign the form in two places.

The most time consuming part of the application deals with figuring out the number of points NY State will award you for the work you have done thus far. You must have a total of at least 3500 points to qualify for a broker license. Points are awarded for each buyer client you have successfully closed, as well as the number of listings, rentals, commercial and land deals you have done. One of the items I found most interesting is if you have a listing, you will get a mere 10 points, and you do NOT get more points when it closes. If, however, you bring a buyer to a deal that closes, you get 250 points. Commercial sales get a lot more points than residential deals.

Hopefully your MLS system has an easy way to print out all the deals you’ve ever done; if yes, this isn’t really more difficult than counting all the different types of deals and entering it into the appropriate place. Once the application is finalized, and you have your broker’s concurrence and signature, the application gets sent to New York State along with your $150 fee.

Becoming an Associate Broker:

The process is almost done at this point! The only thing left to do is to wait. In my case, my application traveled to our corporate headquarters for signatures and was then sent to the Department of State for processing. In NY, we can keep an eye on the eAccessNY system for the status of our license(s) and once the license is issued, we can view our license data. During my daily check of the system yesterday, I found out that my previous real estate salesperson license number was now “Null and Void” and my new Associate Broker license is “Active” and I’m good to go!

And that’s what it takes to get an Associate Broker license in the state of New York!!