The Texas Real Estate Commission adopts amendments to §535.62, concerning Acceptable Courses of Study, and §535.64, concerning Obtaining Approval to Offer a Course, without changes to the proposed text as published in the December 6, 2013, issue of the Texas Register (38 TexReg 8764).

The amendments to §535.62 add Law of Contracts and Promulgated Contract Forms as new subsection (e), which are 30-hour core courses with specific topics, subtopics, and units, with mandated time periods in which instructors must teach each topic or subtopic. The addition of subsection (e) required the re-lettering of the remaining subsections in the rule.

The amendments to §535.64 remove the sentence "This document is published by and available from the Texas Real Estate Commission, P.O. Box 12188, Austin, Texas 78711-2188, www.trec.texas.gov." from subsection (h)(1) and (2) and insert the phrase "which are published by and available from the Texas Real Estate Commission, P.O. Box 12188, Austin, Texas 78711-2188, www.trec.texas.gov" under the main body of subsection (h). The amendments also adopt by reference forms to be used for schools in requesting approval to offer the new Law of Contracts and Promulgated Contract Forms courses.

The reasoned justification for the amendments is to have improved Law of Contracts and Promulgated Contract Forms course curriculum and better educated applicants resulting in improved protection for consumers of real estate services.

One comment was received on the proposal stating that not enough time was allotted for case studies and practice in the Promulgated Contract Forms course, there is a lack of ability to adapt to Texas regions, and that the areas of property condition disclosure, inspections, repairs, financing issues and parties to the contracts are not adequately covered.

The Commission respectfully disagrees with the commenter. The amendments were recommended after many hours of thoughtful deliberation by the Educations Standards Advisory Committee (ESAC), a committee formed, in part, to review and recommend revisions to existing core course curricula and Texas Real Estate Commission's rules addressing school, course and instructor approval. In the Promulgated Contract Forms course, 440 minutes of practice and case studies are allocated. This is approximately 30% of the total course time and this is a minimum requirement. Instructors are permitted to include additional practice time or case studies if they feel that is an effective way to teach the subject matter in the outline. Likewise, the time allocated to subtopics within each unit are suggested times and an instructor can tailor the time to address regional concerns of the students, for instance spending more time on the Farm and Ranch contract in a rural area. Finally, the ESAC believes that adequate time for these courses was allocated to the topics the commenter felt were lacking. The ESAC has or will be recommending changes for all the core courses and balances the amount of material on a topic in any given course for context against what is taught in another course to avoid too much repetition. For example, 240 topic minutes relating to financing are allotted in the Law of Contracts course, knowing that there is another 1,500 minute core course dealing entirely with Real Estate Financing that all applicants must take. For these reasons, the Commission declined to make any changes to the proposal based on this comment.

The amendments are adopted under Texas Occupations Code, §1101.151, which authorizes the Texas Real Estate Commission to adopt and enforce rules necessary to administer Chapters 1101 and 1102; and to establish standards of conduct and ethics for its licensees to fulfill the purposes of Chapters 1101 and 1102 and ensure compliance with those chapters.

The statute affected by these amendments is Texas Occupations Code, Chapter 1101. No other statute, code or article is affected by the amendments.