Online Real Estate Continuing Education for California License

Mr. Chuck Milbourne is 45HoursOnline‘s owner, author, and website developer. He founded 45HoursOnline in May 2006 for the purpose of providing easy yet informative continuing education for California real estate licensees.

In the three decades prior to founding 45HoursOnline, Mr. Milbourne worked as a computer consultant developing applications on a wide variety of platforms (mainframes, to PCs). As a consultant, he used a number of computer languages, but primarily FOCUS, a fourth-generation computer language, and Visual FoxPro. In 2005, Mr. Milbourne began this site’s development while studying for the California real estate broker’s exam. Since 2006 he has held a California broker’s license (DRE: 01765249) and since 2019 he has been a member of the Southland Regional Association of Realtors^®.

Mister Milbourne lives in Woodland Hills, California, with his wife of 53 years.

Inexpensive : We know of no other continuing education (CE) school which offers a 45-hour renewal package at a price lower than ours (details). Our prices are low because our students require little support, our overhead costas are minimal, we develop our own course materials, and we build and maintain our own website.

Fast and Easy : We designed our site from scratch for convenience and ease-of-use.

Unlimited Course Retakes : Unlike many of our competing schools, should you fail a course’s final exam, you may automatically retake it until you pass (see this FAQ for details).

Specialized: We provide CE only to California real estate licensees. In contrast to most CE providers, we do not offer courses to agents licensed by other states and we do not offer pre-license courses needed to sit for DRE’s licensing exams. Unlike larger schools, we do not offer CE for other licensed professionals such as appraisers, contractors, and insurance brokers. Because we are specialized, we keep current with California residential real estate law and our course materials are specific to California residential real estate brokerage.

Above Board : Unlike most other schools, we provide a detailed explanation of how our courses are administered. We provide samples of our materials and a Demonstration Course so you may know what to expect should you choose to purchase our package.

DRE Compliant : We work closely with the Education and Research Section of the California Department of Real Estate to maintain compliance with all CE regulations.

Support : We provide phone support during California business hours and email support on weekends and holidays.

Quality Course Materials : Our materials are current, well-written, and relevant to residential real estate brokerage as practiced in California.

Yes, we are available by phone ((818) 716-1028) during business hours (8:30a.m. to 5:00p.m. PST) and by e-mail at all times. Owing to the number of spam and robo calls we receive, we may not answer your phone call unless your caller ID identifies you by name. When calling about any problem or question concerning your account, please be logged into your Course Work Page.

Yes, all our courses have been extensively reviewed and approved by the Department of Real Estate.

To view our DRE listing, click here, and then enter 45Hours in the first text box like so:

Our site provides a Comments Page permitting students to leave comments regarding our packages. Almost all of our comments are favorable. In particular, we are proud of the comments from these two students (used with their permission):

Also, you may wish to read reviews posted from former students to our Google Business Profile. To do so, click this link to link and then click the picture as shown in the image to the right.

We offer phone and email support from 8:30 to 5:30 during California business hours. If you need to contact us outside these hours, give it a try — we may pick up the phone or respond to your email. We usually check our email many times each day even on weekends and holidays.

Many of the questions we receive about our 45-Hour Package relate to the scheduling of final exams. If this is true of your question, please review these three scheduling rules before contacting us:

When phoning us with questions concerning your course work, please be logged onto your Course Work Page when you call.

Every quarter we conduct a survey of our competitors’ prices for their 45-hour packages. Our last survey was conducted on October 28^th, 2025 and that survey revealed that our standard (undiscounted) price of $49 is the second lowest price available for any 45-hour package. The lowest price is from a provider who normally charges $67 but which at the time of the survey was offering a discounted price of $40.

We also offer a discounted price of $44 for any licensee who completes our Demonstration Course. The Demonstration Course shows how our 45-hour package works and takes just five minutes to complete. Click here to register for the Demonstration Course.

Our principal competitor, First Tuesday, offers a $44.50 price but that price is for a package which requires the student to be online while interacting with the course material for a full 45 hours whereas our package requires the student to be online only to download our textbooks and to take our quizzes and final exams. First Tuesday’s comparable 45-hour package is priced at $60 (source)

Second, your browser automatically verifies our site’s identity using an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. This means you can be confident you are sending your credit card number to us and not to a site pretending to be us.

Third, our server transmits your payment details to Authorize.Net, the Internet’s largest payment gateway. We do not record your credit card number in our database (except for its last four digits). This means that should anyone ever hack our site and steal our database they would not find your credit card number within it. We never know your credit card number. If we need to give you a refund, we do so by reference to a unique number assigned to your transaction by Authorize.Net.

Fourth, you may verify our status as a registered merchant with Authorize.Net by clicking their seal as displayed on our Payment Page. When clicked, your browser sends our server’s domain name to Authorize.Net. Authorize.Net sends back a report which your browser displays in a popup window (see sample to right). The report states that the server’s domain is ours (not a domain pretending to be us) and that our domain is registered as a merchant with Authorize.Net.

If, in spite of our security, you still are uncomfortable using your credit card, we’ll be happy to accept a check or PayPal payment. To pay by check or PayPal, register first but when prompted for payment, push [Don’t Pay] instead of [Process Payment]. When you push [Don’t Pay], we give you instructions for mailing a check or for making a PayPal payment.

To encourage our customers to let other licensees know about our service, we offer a 20% “Referral Discount.” To take advantage of the Referral Discount, you must enter the license ID of a former customer when registering for one of our products. We define “customer” as someone who has purchased one of our products and has passed at least one course (not including the Demo). The Demo Discount may not be added to the Referral Discount – only one discount can be applied.

Yes. To pay by check, register without paying. To do this, first register and when prompted for a credit card push [Pay Later] — the page which follows gives instructions for sending your check.

When we receive your check, we will mark your online record as “paid” and send you a confirming email. Your waiting period (the time you must wait before you can take your first exam) starts when we mark your registration record as paid. Since this method of payment is error prone due to glitches in mail delivery, please contact us by email ( 45HoursOnline@gmail.com) if you don’t receive payment confirmation within three business hours.

PayPal will automatically send us a notice of your payment. When we receive it, we will mark your registration record as “paid” and send you a confirming email. If you do not receive confirmation within three business hours, please contact us at 45HoursOnline@gmail.com.

We always give a full refund provided you haven’t passed any exams (other than the Demo). We will also give you a full refund if your license permanently expired before you could renew it (in other words, if you don’t renew your license within the two-year grace period following your license expiration date). Otherwise, we will give you a partial refund using this formula: PERCENT-OF-UNPASSED-HOURS x .5 x COST. For example, if you passed only our three hour Ethics course in our 45-Hours package for which you paid $49, we will refund you 42/49 x .5 x $49=$21.

To obtain a refund, please e-mail (45HoursOnline@gmail.com). Be sure to give your DRE#. We will need your DRE# to find your Authorize.Net approval code in our records (Authorize.Net is the payment gateway we use for processing your credit card payment). Please understand that we don”t store your credit card number and we don”t need it to give you a refund.

We will also grant full refunds to licensees who, because of time restrictions, can not renew their licenses on time or to licensees who are renewing late (within the two-year grace period) and because of time restrictions can not renew their license in time to avoid the termination of their license.

The Four-Day Study Period applies to our 45-Hour package. It is the minimum number of study days that are required before you may begin taking your final exams. It begins at the time you pay for the package and ends 96 hours (4 days) later. (Note: the “quiz” is not the final exam. The quiz is a study-aid, required by DRE regulations, which must be taken to advance to the course’s final exam.)

The time the Study Period ends is displayed on your Course Work Page under the column heading “Exam Status” (see below screen shot).

Note in the screen shot above the red check mark next to the word “Quiz”: The check mark means that the student has taken the quiz for the corresponding course. To get credit for the course, you must pass its final exam but in order to take a course’s final exam you must first take its quiz. (No quiz has a passing score although we do give you your score). When an exam is ready, the student will see a link reading Take Final for course-name.

The Four-Day Study Period should not be confused with a course’s “Recovery Period” — that is, the period that a licensee must wait should he fail a course’s final exam twice in succession. The Recovery Period for any course is the same as its course hours; thus, the recovery period for a 10 hour course is 10 hours. During the recovery period you may not take the failed exam nor any other final exam until the Recovery Period expires.

We wish you to know that both the Study Period and the Recovery Periods are imposed not by us but by DRE’s regulations. DRE’s purpose in imposing the Study Period is to ensure that the student has sufficient time to study the course materials for the entire package. DRE’s purpose in imposing the Recovery Period is to ensure that the student has sufficient time to re-study the course materials for the course that he failed.

We provide a textbook for each of our ten courses. Each textbook has about ten pages per course hour (the minimum allowed by DRE regulations). Thus, the textbook for our three-hour Ethics course has about 30 pages (not counting pages without content such as the title page and preface). For all ten courses, the page count is about 500 pages.

The textbooks are formatted as ebooks in PDF format. As such, they may be read online, downloaded and read offline, or printed and read on paper.

Each of the major browsers (Edge, Chrome, FireFox, Safari, and Samsung Internet) has its own built-in PDF reader for displaying PDF files linked through the Web. Each of these built-in PDF readers provides features such as text searching, adjustable fonts, links, rotation, and printing.

You may read our PDF textbooks online or offline. To read any one of them online, just login to your Course Work Page and click the icon. Alternatively, you may download our PDF books and read them offline.

Perhaps the best free PDF reader is the original “Adobe Acrobat Reader DC” freely available for download here.

According to DRE’s regulations, you must take a course’s quiz (or quizzes) before taking its final exam.

We provide just one quiz for each course. A common misconception is that you must pass the quiz to advance to its final exam BUT, although we give you a score after you have taken a quiz, no quiz has a passing score.

Each quiz has as many questions as its corresponding final. Thus, for each of our six three-hour courses, each has one quiz and one final consisting of 16 questions.

The quizzes are nothing like the finals. We do not require you to answer every quiz question but we do require you to answer every question on a final. No quiz has a time limit, but each final has a time limit equal in minutes to its number of questions. Many of the quiz questions are long, some difficult, some ambiguous, and some even tricky; while nearly all questions on the finals are short, straightforward, unambiguous, and never provide more than three possible choices. But the most significant difference between a quiz and its final is that after you take the quiz we give you its answers; something we can not do for its final as DRE regulations forbid us to do so.

The answers we give you to the quizzes are detailed. For each quiz question, we give you not only its answer but a detailed explanation as to why each answer is correct and, often, why the other proposed answers are incorrect. All answers are supported with citations from the course’s text book."

The quizzes are designed as a study aid to help you pass the finals. By taking care to study the topics corresponding to the quiz questions that you got wrong or else got right by chance, you can improve your chances of passing the course’s final. A method for using the quizzes to improve your chances of passing the final is contained in this document: Recommendations for Taking our Final Exams.

Each course has one quiz and one final exam. You must take a course’s quiz before you may take its final exam. The quiz can not be failed, since it has no passing score but the course’s final exam does have a passing score of 70%. You must pass the course’s final to get credit for the course.

Each course has two versions of its final exam, each with different questions; its “Original final,” which you take first; and its “Retake final,” which you take only if you fail the Original. Both versions of the final have the same number of questions as does its quiz. Furthermore, the questions for both finals (Original and Retake) address the same topics in the book and in the same order as does its quiz. So, for example, if quiz question #5 is based on § 4.5.6 in the book, so will final question #5 for both the Original and Final exams.

If you should fail both versions of the course’s final, the DRE requires us to fail you on the course – not the package, just that one course. “Failing the course” does not mean you must repurchase the course or the package, but it does mean that you must restart that one course from the beginning. When you fail the course, you enter the “Study Period’ for that course – its length is equal to the number of hours attributed to the course. So, for example, if you were to fail both the final exams for the seven-hour Consumer Service Reader course, then you would have to wait at least seven hours before you could reattempt to pass its final exam.

After you have failed a course, you are expected to reread the course’s textbook and re-take its quiz. You must wait for the course’s Study Period to pass before our system will allow you retake the failed course’s final exam or the final exam for any other course.

Consistent with DRE regulations, 90% of all questions on each final exam are multiple-choice and 10% are true/false. All multiple-choice questions have three possible answers.

Our final exams have the minimum number of questions permitted by the DRE. The DRE’s minimum is based on the duration of the course as measured in credit hours. (The actual minimum number of questions for a three-hour course is 15 but we use 16 because it is a little easier to reach the 70% threshold with 16 questions than it is with 15.)

Once you begin a final, there are just two possible outcomes: pass or fail. Although you can cancel a final exam, should you do so, you will fail the exam with a score of 0%. If for any reason you are interrupted by a technical failure such as a loss in your Wi-Fi connection, then you will fail the exam. If you should close or navigate off the tab containing the final, you will fail with a score of 0%. If you should start the final and then fall fast asleep, you will fail. Once you begin a final, the only way to avoid failing it is to answer 70% or more of its questions correctly and then to initiate the grading process by either clicking [Grade My Final] or by hitting the exam’s time limit. These unforgiving examination rules we enforce at the insistence of the DRE.

All final exams may be taken “open book,” that is, you may open the course textbook in one tab while taking its final exam in another. However, we do not recommend taking our exams open book for three reasons: (1) most questions do not include keywords sufficiently unique for a well-targeted text search, (2) time spent searching the book is time lost from the task of answering questions, and (3) the more often you switch between tabs the greater is the chance you will inadvertently navigate off the examination page and thus trigger an automatic failure of the exam.

Finally, the DRE requires a time limit for each final exam equal in minutes to its number of questions. If you should run out of time when taking a final exam, unanswered questions are counted as “incorrect” and your exam is graded accordingly.

The DRE limits the rate at which you can complete your CE to 15-credit hours within the preceding 24-hour period. Accordingly, when our system renders your Course Work Page after the Four-Day Study Period, it determines the number hours of CE you completed in the preceding 24-hours, subtracts this number from 15, and then makes available only those final exams providing as many or fewer hours than that difference.

Our 45-hour package is designed to take advantage of the 15-Credits-Per-Day Rule such that after the Four-Day Study Period you may complete your CE in only three sittings with 24 hours or more between sittings one-and-two and two-and-three (see schedule to the right).

If you should fail a course’s first final exam, called the “Original,” you are given a second chance with its Retake exam. Both versions of the final, the Original and Retake, have the same number of questions and a comparable level of difficulty. You may take the Retake exam immediately after failing the Original, BUT it is usually a good idea to invest additional study time in the course before attempting to pass it because should you fail the Retake then we are required to fail you on the course — not the package but just that one course.

To prepare for the Retake exam, we recommend that you study the topics corresponding to the questions you missed or guessed correctly on the quiz — in other words, the “iffy questions.” To discover which topics you should study, click the course’s

icon on the Course Work Page, note down the question and section number for each iffy question and then, for each, read its answer in the course’s Quiz Explanations document the section in the book on which the question is based.

The amount of additional study you may wish to invest before taking the Retake exam depends on how badly you failed the Original. If you failed the Original by a narrow margin, you may need only a little extra time to study just a handful of topics from your iffy list. But if your score on the Original was close to 38% — the score one would receive by chance alone — then you should consider studying the topics for every question on your iffy list.

If you renew late, the DRE will require you to pay a “late fee.” The late fee is 50% of the on-time renewal fee. If you are licensed as a salesperson and you renew late, you will have to pay $525 to renew your license instead of the on-time fee of $350 or if you are licensed as a broker or a corporation, you will have to pay $675 to renew your license instead of the on-time fee of $450.

If your license is expired and you fail to renew it by the end of your two-year grace period, you will lose it. To restore a lost license, you must again pass the State real estate exam and then reapply for your license.

Should you fail a course’s final exam twice in succession, you must start over for that course – NOT THE ENTIRE PACKAGE – just that one course.

Starting over for a course means that you must (1) wait for the course’s recovery period to end, (2) retake the course’s

(remember, there is no passing score on the quiz), and (3) pass the course’s Original exam or, should you fail it, pass the course’s Retake exam. Unlike many of our competitors, we do not charge you for retaking a course – one time or 101 times – nor is there any need to contact us to reset the course.

When you fail a course’s retake exam and are forced into its recovery period, you may not take the course’s final exam nor any other final exam. For example, if you were to fail both the original and retake final exams for the Ethics course, you would then be forced into the three-hour recovery period for that course. During that three hours, you would not be permitted to take any final exam – not for the Ethics course nor for any other course.

The Certificate lists every course passed and, for each, shows its “Certificate No.,” the date you completed the course, its name, and DRE’s official classification (aka, “designation”) for the course (e.g., “consumer services,” “consumer protection,” “risk management,” etc.).

Although your certificate should always be available on our site, we recommend that you print it and keep it for your records nevertheless. DRE’s Education and Research Section audits a tiny fraction of its continuing education records as submitted by licensees either via eLicensing or by mail. Commissioner’s Regulation 3013 provides that upon the request of the DRE, “the applicant shall submit certificates of attendance or certified copies thereof from sponsors of approved offerings to substantiate the information provided by the applicant.” A licensee who fails to provide the DRE with course completion certificates as required, may be subject to a fine or potential disciplinary action.

Note: While you may complete your continuing education at any time during the term of your license, you may not renew your real estate license any earlier than three months prior to your expiration date.

First print your certificate using the

button from our Course Work Page (the page that lists all the courses comprising the package). The certificate contains the details needed for renewing your license (see figure to right). Please note that there is not one certificate number but one certificate number for each course. When prompted by eLicensing: for each course, enter its (1) certificate number (e.g., ‘4295-####’ — where ‘####‘ is a four-digit course code), (2) completion date (e.g., ‘11/01/25’) and (3) your registration date (e.g., ‘10/13/25’ – the same date for all courses). After entering these three items, press the return key.

Second, decide if you wish to renew via eLicensing (DRE’s online renewal service) or by mail. We strongly recommend that you renew online because renewal online is immediate, fast, and final whereas renewal by mail may take weeks and, should the DRE find anything wrong with your renewal application or payment, the process could take still more weeks to complete.

To renew using eLicensing, click the eLicensing icon at the bottom of this section (you may have to register first) and choose [Salesperson|Broker License Renewal]. eLicensing will prompt you to complete two online forms: (1) Continuing Education Course Verification, and (2) Renewal Application. Finally, eLicensing will prompt you to make an online payment via a secure connection (for the DRE’s current license renewal rates click here). Once eLicensing accepts your payment your license is renewed. (If you would like to preview the license renewal process using eLicensing, click here.)

Note: If you have a salesperson license and you are employed by a broker, then your broker must validate your renewal in a subsequent eLicensing transaction (eLicensing will provide you with instructions). Your broker’s validation is not required for your new license to be effective.

Note: If you renew by mail, do not send your certificate to the DRE. The purpose of the certificate is to list the certificate numbers and corresponding dates of completion for you to copy onto form RE#251.

Licensees often have trouble with eLicensing when prompted for their their certificates numbers. Note that it’s certificate numbers plural — one for each course. To begin the process, click [Add Course] when prompted by the form shown to the right.

Then, for each Certificate No. enter it together with its Registration Dt and Completion Dt. and click [Save]. Do this for each course listed on the Certificate. After you have entered the last Certificate No., click [Validate].

The minimum completion time for our 45-hour package is six days and three hours, assuming you spend three hours in total taking your final exams. This minimum is based on two timing rules imposed by the DRE:

Given these two limitations, consider the following example in which Sally completes her 45-hours in only six days and three hours:

In this example, the elapsed time from when Sally registered to the time she completed all 45 hours was six days and three hours.

We get this question a lot. No, we do not have a single, comprehensive final examination that tests your understanding of the content for all courses comprising the package. Rather we have one final exam for each course. Each final exam must be passed with a score of 70% or better to earn credit for the course. Moreover, you have two chances to pass each final exam using two exams called the “Original” and the “Retake.” (See this FAQ for an explantion of what happens when you fail both exams.)

DRE regulations require that once you begin a final exam (that is, see its questions), we must grade your final. Finals are graded in only two ways: (1) by clicking the button [Grade My Final] or (2) reaching the end of the final’s time limit in which case our testing procedure grades your final with whatever questions you may have answered.

Also, while taking a final, you should take care to not refresh the page displaying the final. If you do so, your answers will be lost.

Every California real estate licensee requires 45-hours of DRE-approved continuing education (CE) to renew his license. The only exception is the licensee who has held his license for 30 continuous years in good standing and is 70 years of age or older on the date his license expires (details).

DRE's official description of their CE requirements can be found here, but you need only know that by completing our 45-Hour Package you will have all the CE needed to renew your license regardless of how you are licensed ("salesperson," "broker," etc.) and regardless as to how many times you may have renewed before.

The reminder letter DRE mails to each licensee three months prior to the licensee’s expiration date falsely states that subsequent renewals (that is, licensees not renewing for the first time) must take a nine-hour survey course (see excerpt below).;

This statement is incomplete, as DRE’s official description of a licensee’s CE requirements states that licensees may take the seven mandatory subjects separately in lieu of the nine-hour survey course (see excerpt below). It is this alternative that we provide in our 45-Hour Package.

To the right you can see our listing as of November, 2025 as it appeared in DRE’s list of Approved Real Estate Continuing Education Courses. DRE’s list of “designations” (shown as “categories”) is over a yellow background. The criteria for categorizing courses into designations are explained in DRE’s Form 329, Course Guidelines.

The “designations’ are categories of required continuing education. For example, the designation of “consumer protection” is broadly defined in Form 329 under paragraph 8 and which includes a long list of topics which help agents protect the interests of their clients.

Every course must have a title paired with a “designation.” We have chosen to make our course titles correspond to the designations for which they are intended. Thus, the three-hour course required for the designation of “ethics” is entitled Ethics. The one exception is the title of our ten-hour Defensive Real Estate course which is designated as a consumer protection course.

The “mandatory” topics required for all licensees are: (1) ethics, (2) agency, (3) fair housing, (4) trust funds, (5) risk management, and (6) implicit bias training. Brokers and officers have one additional mandatory topic, the three-hour Management and Supervision course. This last course is included in our one-size-fits-all 45-Hour Package. Although it is not mandatory for salespersons, it does count towards the 45-hour CE requirement for salespersons as three additional hours of consumer protection.

On rare occasions and usually during the weekends, DRE’s renewal site (eLicensing) goes down either for scheduled maintenance or due to a technical problem. If eLicensing happens to be down the day you wish to renew and if that day is your expiration day, the DRE may not grant you an extension.

If eLicensing is down on your license expiration day and you must renew on that day to avoid a late fee, you should renew by mail. As long as your renewal application is postmarked by midnight of that day (or the next day for which there is mail service), the DRE will accept your renewal application without requiring you to pay a late fee.

You may complete your continuing education (CE) anytime during the term of your real estate license (which is four years for all real estate licensees no matter how licensed) or during the two-year grace period that follows license expiration.

If your license is active, you may not renew your license with the DRE any earlier than three months prior to your license expiration date. If your license is expired, then you may renew at any time during the two-year grace period that begins the day after your license expired. When you renew on time, the term of your new license begins the day after your current license expires.

If you renew your license during the two-year grace period, your new license begins the day after you renew it. So, for example, if you were to renew your license on the last day of your two-year grace period, your new license would begin on the day following.

Please understand that you are not permitted to sell real estate while your license is expired. Also, when you renew during the grace period, the renewel fee is 150% of the on-time renewal fee. (See DRE’s renewal fees here.)

If you were to fail to renew your license before the end of your two-year grace period, you would lose your license. If this were to occur and if you wanted to restore your license, then you would have to apply for a new licensee. This application process would include the requirement that you pass the real estate exam once again. (See the DRE’s instructions for applying for the salesperson exam here or their instructions for applying for the broker exam here.)

If you are in the two-year grace period and wish to retain your license, consider doing it this way: Complete your CE now (or at any time during the year following its date of purchase) and then print your completion certificate and file it away for safe-keeping (although it will always be available on this site). Then, should you suddenly have the need to renew your license, you will be able to do so without much delay by simply going to the DRE’s renewal site, entering the certificate numbers from your certificate, and paying DRE’s renewal fee.

No, all CE hours must be earned during the term of your active license or, if your license has expired, during the two-year grace that follows the expiration of your license. The CE hours for a given course are earned upon passing the course’s final exam.

No, all 45-hours of CE must be earned before the DRE will permit you to renew your license. Therefore, you should begin your CE no less than two weeks prior to the expiration of your license or, if you are are renewing late, the expiration of your two-year grace period. (Although it is possible to complete your CE in as little as six days and a few hours, doing so is difficult as it requires adherence to an exacting schedule and to the good fortune of not failing many courses. See this FAQ for an explanation.)

If you are over seventy years of age and have held your license in good standing for thirty years you may be eligible for an exemption. Click here for details.

But we are willing to grant any student a full refund who is unable to complete his CE before his license expires or before the end of his two-year grace period. (Note: when we grant a refund, we delete the student’s registration and the student loses any CE credits he may have earned.)

The DRE does not permit us to give you the answers to our final exams in any form or at any time. This prohibition is based on Commissioner’s Regulation 3007.3(a)(1)which reads:

A licensee loses his license if he fails to renew it within two years of its expiration date; in other words, if the applicant failed to renew his license during his two-year grace period.

To restore a lost license, one must pass the real estate exam before applying for a new license. The current requirements for a salesperson license are found here, for a broker’ license here, and for a corporate license here. Upon restoring a lost license, the applicant would receive a new four-year license bearing the applicant’s original DRE#.

NOTE TO BROKERS RENEWING LATE: If you earned your broker’s license prior to 2013 and qualified using your four-year college/university degree in lieu of the two-year experience requirement, be advised that the DRE no longer allows this substitution. All broker applicants must now meet a two-year experience requirement excepting only those applicants with a four-year degree majoring or minoring in real estate. Details about the law that disallowed broker applicants to substitute any four-year college/university degree for the two-year experience requirement can be found in this FAQ from the DRE.

For example, if you had qualified for your broker’s license in 2005 using your four-year college degree in Psychology in lieu of the two-year experience requirement and if you were to lose your license as a result of having not renewed it during your grace period, then you would not be able to restore your broker’s license unless you had acquired since 2005 at least two years of experience working under another broker’s license.

You should be acquainted with the following facts before deciding whether to renew late; that is, during your two-year grace period:

If you are not practicing real estate and you wish to retain your license, it is to your advantage to renew as late into the two-year grace period as you can. This is because your new real estate license will begin the day after you renew it thereby extending the term of your license.

It is also to your advantage to complete your CE now rather than wait for when you need it or when your two-year grace period is about to expire for two reasons: (1) should you need your license quickly, your renewal will take only minutes using eLicensing since you will have already fulfilled your CE requirement, and (2) if you start your CE well before your two-year grace period ends, you will have plenty of time to complete it (although you must complete your CE within one year of registration).

Yes. The DRE randomly selects licensees who have recently renewed for a CE audit. Our best guess is that any one licensee has a 1% chance for being selected for an audit.

If audited, you will receive a letter from the DRE requesting a copy of your course completion certificate. In most cases, all you will need to do is to log into your Course Work Page and click the [Display Certificate] button to display and then print your certificate. More information about DRE’s audit policy is given in this DRE document.

DRE regulation 3006(m) states that “All offerings shall require completion within one year from the date of regulation.” This is the date that you paid for the package. You can find your registration date by clicking [Display Receipt] on your product’s Course Work Page.

All courses already completed within the one year period following your payment date, are acceptable to the DRE; any course completed after that period is rejected. (A course is completed when its final exam is passed.)

We do not enforce a “seat time” requirement nor does the DRE require that we do so. Instead, we enforce an initial Study Period of four days to ensure that students have sufficient time to read their course materials.

Seat-time is a requirement that each student spend at least the full number of course hours interacting with the course material. This requirement is enforced no matter how quickly the student reads or how well the student may already know the course content.

For example, a seat-time requirement for a 15-hour course would require the student to maintain an online connection to his course material lasting at least 15 hours as accumulated during one or more online sessions. To maintain that connection, the student must press the keys on his keyboard every so often to indicate that he is interacting with the course content (for example, keys for paging the course material or for answering questions). Should the student fail to maintain the connection, the provider’s site’s server cancels his session thereby requiring him to once again login to continue earning time towards his seat-time requirement.

To ensure that the student isn’t just clicking through the course material without reading it, the CE provider often requires the student to pass a quiz to demonstrate his understanding of the most recently completed section before allowing the student to advance to the next section.

The Problem: Upon returning to a PDF after having viewed one of its linked pages, the browser resets the position of the PDF to its beginning. So, for example, if you were to click a link on page 32 of our Ethics book, the browser would return you to its first page. Ugh!

Depending on the device and the browser you use, we recommend the following ways to mitigate this problem.

Edge and Chrome (except when using Chrome on an iPad or iPhone)

Position the mouse over the link and right-click it. In response, the browser will display a pop-up-menu from which you may select “Open link in new window” (see adjacent screenshot). Using this option, the browser will place the linked document in a new tab such that when you close it, the browser will return you to the source PDF document with it’s position unchanged.

Safari on the Mac

On the Mac, we recommend you read our PDF’s in “Preview Mode.” (see first screen shot on left); To enter Preview Mode (see second screen shot on left) after accessing the PDF document, right-click anywhere in the document (on the Trackpad, a right-click is simulated using <Ctrl><Click>) and then select “Open with Preview” from the resultant pop-up menu. When clicking links in Preview Mode, the Mac will display those links outside of Preview Mode using Safari. You can then toggle between the two apps, Preview and Safari.

Chrome and Safari on iOS Devices such as iPhones and iPads

As far as we know, the only way to avoid this problem — and this way is admittedly crude as it requires several steps — is to right-click the link in the PDF and select “Copy” from the resultant pop-up menu (see screen shot to left). (You can simulate the right-click on an iPad or iPhone by holding your finger on the link and releasing it once your device displays a pop-up menu). Next, open a new tab in Safari and on its address line paste the link and click “Paste and Go” (see screen shot to right).

To keep a textbook open while taking a final exam, do the following: (1) Login, (2) Click the BOOK icon for the course for which you are taking the exam — this opens the textbook in a new window/tab, (3) switch back to the originating window (using <Alt><Tab> or by clicking its tab), (4) Click [Take Test]. See the below figure for details.

We keep your records indefinitely. We have records for some students going back to 2006 — the year 45HoursOnline began doing business.

CE has been required for license renewal since 1978. The requirement has always been for 45 hours. Over the subsequent years the following courses were made mandatory …

We provide a detailed history of CE in this document. For each significant event in the history of the CE requirement, it provides a link to the article in the edition of DRE’s Real Estate Bulletin that describes it.

01/01/1983	Ethics is required.
06/01/1987	Agency is required.
01/01/1996	Trust Fund Handling and Fair Housing are required.
01/01/2006	45HoursOnline goes online.
01/07/2007	Risk Management is required.
01/01/2016	Management and Supervision is required.
01/01/2023	Implicit Bias Training is required as is an extended Fair Housing course which includes a “interactive/participatory component.”