The Bay State may have some of the highest home prices in the country, but we also have some of the lowest licensing standards for real estate agents. And despite some rumblings on Beacon Hill, it looks like a real fix to this embarrassing problem could prove elusive.

A bill now slowly moving through the Legislature would boost the number of classroom hours, but would still manage to leave Massachusetts’ licensing standards far below the national average. And it may not be enough to placate some industry veterans frustrated over the lack of quality control.

The ease of entry into the field has bedeviled long-time brokers here in Massachusetts, some of whom blame a flood of ill-trained newcomers for messing up all sorts of transactions and helping drag down the image of the field.

And there’s also the mouths-to-feed issue – while listings have fallen off a cliff since the peak of the bubble, the number real estate agents has dropped only modestly.

“The licensing test is incredibly easy,” said one long-time broker. “A bright 12-year-old could pass it.”

Want to be a real estate agent here in Massachusetts? No problem. Park your body in a classroom for a couple days, take a ridiculously easy test, and you’re good to go. After a year’s worth of tutelage under a veteran agent, you can then take the harder brokers’ test.

The 24 hours of classroom instruction would-be real estate agents here in Massachusetts are required to take can be packed into a weekend, and are the third-lowest in the country, according to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors (MAR).

That’s a far cry from Texas, where aspiring members of the real estate profession are required to put in 210 hours; or California, where its 135.

But even if the Legislature passes this bill, and there is no guarantee it will fly, Massachusetts will require just 40 hours of classroom instruction, when the national average is more than 60.

Tentacles And Lunch Ladies

While I doubt many people are losing sleep over this, if you plan to sell or buy a house in Massachusetts, just pray you don’t get shoved into the hands of some bumbling, half-trained agent. Given the complexity of the home sales process – which any homeowner has certainly had a taste of – it can be easy to screw up.

And the worst nightmare for many real estate veterans is sitting across the table from a newbie agent who knows just enough to make a nightmarish mess of what should be a garden variety real estate transaction.

They have some wonderful names for these greenhorns.

“Kitchen broker” is the slang for some young guy thinking he will get rich selling real estate part-time, sitting at his kitchen table on a Saturday morning drawing up offers. “Lunch broker” is a play off the old phrase “lunch ladies,” and connotes an amateurish sales effort that mainly involves chatting with the gals or guys at lunch.

Then there are the “tentacles,” a term that describes the legions of wannabes who invariably wash out after finding out that a business that looked pretty easy on the outside is actually pretty tough to survive.

These agents may hang up their licenses, but big real estate franchises know they can count on them for a steady stream of referrals from family and friends, notes one top local real estate attorney.

It would be amusing if there weren’t so many ways to mess up the sale of a home, but unfortunately, there are.

A homebuyer could lose thousands in deposit money if an inexperienced agent misses a key deadline, of which there are many in the byzantine home sales process.

“I would be personally pleased if the number [of agents] dropped, and the reason the number dropped was the quality increased,” said Rona Fischman, principal broker of 4 Buyers Real Estate. (In the interest of full disclosure, Rona and I both write for the same blog). “Someone could lose a lot of money working with an inexperienced broker.”

An Economic Argument

But there’s also an economic argument here for raising standards. After years of falling sales and prices, the number of homes on the market has fallen dramatically from the peak.

The number of agents has dropped maybe 10 percent from its peak, or about 2,000 agents.

But the number of homes on the market has fallen much more precipitously – as much as 20 percent from 2006, when the housing bubble started to burst.

There are too many agents right now chasing too little business.

The folks at MAR are great, but true to form, trying to discern the organization’s true intent here is difficult.

My guess is that the organization, under pressure from veteran members to raise standards, has decided to go halfway and boost educational requirements while still keeping them relatively low.

Steve Ryan, the general counsel of government affairs chief for the Realtors group, wasn’t biting in a recent interview, saying only that MAR’s board thought it would be a good thing to do.

In fact, he would not acknowledge that beefing up the classroom hours would likely result in fewer aspiring real estate agents taking the exam.

“I don’t think increasing it by 16 hours is going to make a substantial difference,” Ryan said. MAR’s board believed the increase to 40 hours would be a reasonable balance between significantly boosting hours and making sure licensees would be able to “complete their educational requirements in a reasonable amount of time.”

Obviously, even the modest boost in standards our state lawmakers are now considering will have some sort of an impact.

That’s economics 101 – more classroom pain, fewer test takers. The real question, though, is whether it goes far enough to help right-size our state’s struggling real estate sales industry.

And I am not alone in being skeptical about that.