How I almost wasn’t an e-Pro: Why you shouldn’t wait to the last minute to do your homework . . .

by Cathleen Collins

Realtor, Staging Consultant

Author website

Shhh. Come closer. I have a confession to make. This past week I became an e-Pro! It took me an entire six months to become one — not because it was so difficult, nor because I was so very busy, but because I wasn’t motivated. Then why, you might wonder, particularly if you are in the techno-crowd who subscribes to RSS feeds and reads this weblog, would I have spent $359 and any precious time at all to earn my tinfoil badge?

About the time I enrolled Greg and myself in the e-Pro program, I was finishing up my GRI courses and Greg had just earned his CRS and ABR designations. I had taken the ABR courses with Greg, but couldn’t earn the designation yet because I didn’t have enough buyer sides. In fact, the only NAR-recognized designation left to me at that point in my career was e-Pro. And, as I explained to Greg while twisting his arm to join me in getting the designation, it was just plain silly for the two of us to not be able to promote ourselves as being technologically astute. Other Realtors who hadn’t even known email basics before taking the e-Pro course were able, with NAR’s blessing, to promote themselves as

highly skilled and continuously trained professionals who provide high quality and innovative online-based real estate services.

Further,

Consumers can identify the e-PRO through the exclusive e-PRO Internet Professional logo.

Now, I can’t come close to Greg or even Cameron when it comes to IT proficiency, but I left a job as an IT consultant at PerotSystems when I began working as a Realtor. So if a consumer of real estate services wants someone with technology skills to help buy or sell his house, and believes that the e-Pro designation is the industry’s endorsement of a Realtor’s IT competence, and we didn’t have the designation, we might be missing the opportunity to meet the very type of people whom we could serve best.

So, I enrolled us both in the e-Pro course, and by the end of the week Greg had begrudgingly earned his designation. He just sat at his desk and plowed through the material, griping the whole time about what a joke it was. But I’m more easily distracted than Greg, so when he was winding up his requirements, I was just finishing Module 1 of 4.

Somewhere within Module 2 I lost interest. This module is titled E-mail Communication and Marketing, so can you imagine how tedious that chapter is? Section 1 of this module is headed Section 1 – Electronic Mail (E-mail) – A New Way to Communicate. New? For whom? I forgive my mother for not corresponding by email because she’s 85 years old, and besides my father’s there to print out email that I mean for her. But if email is new to anyone who is in school or business, how could that be? I can’t even come up with a smart-alecky excuse like “you must have been in a coma for the past decade.” I’ve had clients who don’t have cell phones, but never one who doesn’t use email. That doesn’t mean I’ll never have a client without email, but I bet that if and when that ever happens, the client is neither a student nor in the workforce. If I’m wrong, I’ll post a photo of me standing on my head… So how can email be a new way for anyone making a living in real estate to communicate?

I found the entire second Module annoying, so I lost my resolve. I still wanted to be able to say I had the designation, but week after week I forwarded my task to “Finish the e-Pro Curriculum” to some date in the future. Until Friday before last. I vaguely remembered that my tuition for the course was good only till sometime in November. And, I didn’t have any commitments for that first weekend of the month, so I set aside the weekend as classroom time to finish the course and become an e-Pro. At 8:00 PM Friday, November 3, I signed on and immediately felt my heart drop to my stomach. At the top of the page was a warning that I needed to complete the course by November 3. Alternatively, I could pay for an extension. Yikes! I ran through the administrative pages of the course to find out what was meant by a November 3 expiration. Was that at the end of the business day or midnight or some other specific time? Midnight. So midnight where? Pacific Standard Time. I sighed relief when I remembered that less than a week earlier the PST states had changed their clocks, so Phoenix was no longer tracking to California’s time… Denver had caught up with us. Remember, I’m easily distracted, so I warned Greg, I warned Cameron, I warned my mother and my sisters to leave me alone! Then I pretended I was Greg and put my attention to the task, ignoring everything else that was going on around me.

I had five hours to complete eight sections, and by the time I had completed the four sections in Module Three, I knew I was pacing well. I would be done before 1:00 PM. At one point, though, when I was really in the zone, the ding dang tutorial decided that I had hit the NEXT button too fast to have read the material on the screen, so it returned me to the page I had just read, with a warning that I needed to slow down and read all the material. I re-read it, but this time, since I had already read it once, I must have read it faster. So I was taken back to read the screen again. This time I tried to read it slowly, but I wasn’t slow enough, and there I was back at the same page once more. I knew I was growing impatient, so I let the thrice read material sit on my screen while I took a break. Finally, I was allowed to proceed.

It was 12:30 AM MST, and I had just finished the third section of the fourth module. This gave me a full 30 minutes to complete the course. I kept my eye on the course progress, and as I rounded the bend toward the finish line, with only one more page to go before my final chapter test, I knew I could finish in the few minutes I had left before 1:00 AM. But that final, pre-test page had a surprise waiting for me… it was a writing assignment. Now if you read this weblog regularly, you’ll notice that I’m not the frequent contributor that Greg or Russell are. There’s a reason for that… it takes me a while and several versions before I’m happy enough with what I’m writing that I’ll let it ship. This is so whether it’s a weblog article, a report, an email message, or even a card. I don’t have Greg’s talent where words just flow out of me. So I almost choked on that twelfth hour writing assignment. Almost choked, but instead I swallowed hard and decided I’d make it short and sweet, and write in only one pass.

The assignment was to write about something I learned in the course, formatted per the email etiquette outlined in the lessons. Here’s what I submitted:

From: Cathleen Collins
Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2006 12:59 AM
To: ‘Module4Digest@eProNAR.com’
Subject: Why you shouldn’t wait till the last minute to finish your ePro assignments

I enrolled in ePro around the time I was finishing up earning my GRI. I felt I was using technology so well in my business, and in fact had left a position as a consultant for a technology company to enter the real estate business. So it seemed silly for me to not have the ePro designation.

By the end of Module 2, I became disenchanted with the course material, so forwarded my “work on ePro” task in my PDA to the “next day” every day for months.

Tonight, at about 8:00 MST, I finally signed on to work some more toward my designation… I vaguely remembered that I needed to finish the course sometime in November. Well, as it turned out, I needed to finish the course tonight… and that ends in 2 minutes! So gotta run!

This is why you shouldn’t wait till the last minute to finish your ePro assignments!

Cathleen Collins, Realtor, GRI, P$C (Property Staging Consultant)
BloodhoundRealty.com Devoted Dedicated Determined
http://www.BloodhoundRealty.com/
Phone: 602-369-9275 Fax: 602-504-1353

(I just noticed, my final assignment was a short and sweet version of this article!)

Anyhow, whew! I sent the email message at 12:59 AM, making the deadline, I thought, with one minute to spare. But, the e-Pro course had one last sadistic turn in store for me — a comprehensive final exam! I knew I couldn’t complete the final exam in that final minute before the PST stroke of midnight. But I didn’t know the extent of the tutorial’s tolerance for my bad timing. Would my exam answers be accepted after midnight? Or would the program freeze up? Or would the answers look like they were accepted, but then be rejected when a proctor discovered I had gone past midnight? Or would I get a popup upon trying to submit my answers, advising me that with a $60 extension payment I would be allowed to continue to finish my course? I put the doubts out of my head, pushed ahead, and finally, at 1:17 AM I finished the course with a passing grade. But all week I held my breath, expecting to have the automatic response I received upon course completion pulled back once a living, breathing person saw that I had taken an extra seventeen minutes to reach my goal. It wasn’t until I got my certificate and pin in the mail this past weekend that I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that I could order my new business cards, and share my secret with you.

So what do I think about the e-Pro course? Well, they improved it between the time Greg completed the course and I completed it. They even discuss web-logging in the updated tutorial that I took. For the less IT-proficient, e-Pro is probably a godsend. If email is indeed a new medium for anyone he really needs to take this course. I know from past experience that it isn’t easy to teach technology with a one-size-fits-all curriculum, because there are so many different depths of skill. Perhaps it would be asking too much to administer different courses and different levels of designation, but there is still probably a better way. The first time I took a formal class in Crystal Report Writing, I believed I should take the advanced level, but since I was new to the school that was teaching the course I had to take a pre-placement test to demonstrate that the advanced material would not be wasted on me. I think a similar pre-placement test would help with the e-Pro designation. We could either earn our designation by passing a pre-course exam, or failing that take the course or parts of the course where the exam found weaknesses. For Realtors who are less confident of their IT skills, the pre-course exam could be skipped altogether, avoiding unnecessary test-panic, and letting those Realtors learn important skills. Or rather than having a separate IT designation, rather than having e-Pro at all, perhaps it would be better for every Realtor to have IT course work in his licensing requirements for continuing education. That way several different courses could be offered, letting the individual Realtor chose the one of greatest interest and best fitting his skill level.

Whether or not the NAR or state licensing authorities require IT skills, I believe any Realtor who does not know the basics described in the e-Pro coursework is doing a disservice to his clients.

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