| Realtors on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are subject to new fair housing training requirements after a vote by the members of the region’s Realtor association.
Cape Cod & Islands Association of Realtors will have until Dec. 31, 2024 to take their first two-hour round of training, the association said in a statement Tuesday, and must take the training every three years. The vote in favor of the requirement was “overwhelming,” the association said.
Part of the inspiration for the requirement, association CEO Ryan Castle said, was to help differentiate Realtors from licensed agents who aren’t part of the association. It’s also part of the association’s ongoing efforts to raise the profile of fair housing issues in the real estate industry.
“Consumers deserve to know their rights are protected. Now, when a member of the public works with a Realtor who is a member of CCIAOR, they know their agent has been educated about all forms of housing discrimination and knows how to ensure fair treatment of everyone. This is an important and necessary step to reaffirm and improve the industry as a whole,” Castle said in a statement.
With awareness growing among prosecutors, consumers and agents of housing discrimination’s persistence in Massachusetts decades after the Civil Rights Movement, state legislators took up two bills this session focused on reforming real estate agent training.
One, backed by housing advocates, would have added statewide fair housing training and continuing education requirements, but also empowered fair housing enforcement agencies to refer more cases to the Board of Real Estate Brokers. the Board of Registration of Real Estate Brokers and Salespersons and added fair housing experts to the board. Under that bill, fair housing violations would have been punished by a 180-day license suspension.
A second bill, backed by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, sought to add similar training requirements, but stopped short of increasing penalties for violations.
Both bills were folded into a third, compromise piece of legislation (S.2675) in February, which would require four hours of continuing education courses on “fair housing law or diversity and inclusion in real estate” and a similar amount of fair housing training as part of real estate license courses but removes the extra penalties for fair housing violations. The bill also would add a fair housing expert to the registration board and require the board to publish lists of new agents quarterly and accounts of fair housing violation report it receives and investigates. Lastly, the bill sets up an expert committee to explore and recommend further changes to reduce housing discrimination.
The bill is currently before the legislature’s Joint Committee on Rules and has until July 31 to pass the legislature.
