You are a sales representative showing a house to clients, first-time home buyers. The house is a ranch-style bungalow with an attached garage and a finished basement. It is also, as you’ve told your clients, a “fixer-upper.” As you’re showing the house, you notice several plaster cracks. Some are small cracks (less than ¼ inch) at the upper corner of doors and windows. Some cracks follow drywall or plaster joints, while others run diagonally across the entire wall.
What would you tell your clients about the cracks, if anything?
As a real estate professional, you should be able to provide clients with some basic information – if the house is, in fact, structurally deficient. The College offers such a course. Recognizing Structural Deficiencies in Homes: A Primer for Real Estate Professionals, is a three-credit continuing education course delivered online via e-Learning.
Presented by Carson Dunlop & Associates Ltd., the goal of this course is to help you recognize a house that should be treated with caution. As such, at the conclusion of this course, you will be able to:
• recognize the various structural components that make up a single-family residential building
• explain the function of each structural component
• identify six common structural deficiencies in a home using simple visual techniques
If you suspect that the house has structural deficiencies, you should recommend that any offer be conditional upon a home inspection.
Recognizing Structural Deficiencies in Homes is one of 26 online continuing education (CE) courses offered by the College to help you complete your mandatory CE requirements, namely a minimum of 24 continuing education credits in each two-year registration cycle. If you are within your first two-year Real Estate Salesperson registration cycle, you are only required to complete the three articling courses.
The College also offers bundles of courses. For more information, go to http://www.orea.com/OREA-Real-Estate-College/Continuing-Education/Credit-Bundles. Go to your My Portfolio to enrol.
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| Please Note |
| All courses begin the day you register (Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.). If you register after 4:30 p.m. or on a weekend/statutory holiday, you will be activated the next business day. Continuing Education students are permitted access to their e-Learning course for a period of two years after the date of registration. After the course has been completed and credits are issued, you will be allowed access to the course, for non-credit reference purposes only, for the remainder of the two-year period. |
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