October 2020

Code of Ethics

As you may all know, the Code of Ethics cycle has now been expanded to a 3 year cycle. The current cycle, Cycle 6, runs from January 2019 through December 31, 2021.

Another change approved by NAR Board of Directors concerns the C2EX endorsement. Any member who has earned this endorsement within the cycle, Cycle 6, can use that to meet the requirement for the COE education. Then any member who earns or renews (which involves additional C2EX education) within cycle 7 will meet the COE requirement, etc.

If your member takes the course online at nar.realtor, the Education record will be added automatically and you are notified via the NRDS Daily Changes.

If the member takes the course elsewhere, the POE is required to add the Education record into NRDS. Please be sure to follow these entry guidelines to make sure the COE Reports work and the information is displayed correctly to your members in their Profile on nar.realtor.

Group Code should always be BPP

Course Code enter COEC

Course Number enter 2019C6 or 2020C6 or 2021C6 depending on the year completed

Course Completion Date enter the course completion date

Sponsoring Entity enter your Association ID

NOTE: the C2EX endorsement, as with the Certifications, are entered by our Education group (CSRE) who are the POEs for the certifications and endorsements.

Also be sure to keep track of your renewing members and whether or not they have completed the requirement. You can do this in several ways.

On the main menu in the General Information section, you will find the COE Reports. You can run the report for members ‘with’ or members ‘without’ and can save the report as a csv so you can open it in Excel. This is very helpful as you can then copy the email column to do your own email blast, or sort by the Office ID to copy and paste a list to email to the broker to let them know which of their Realtor agents have not yet completed the requirement. The members with C2EX appear on the ‘with’ report.

If you see a member on the ‘without’ report you feel should not be there, check out their Education record. Is the Group Code, Course Code and Course Number correct as shown above.

Also keep in mind this report is not for new members. They must take a COE course for new members as part of your new member orientation. So anyone with a Joined Date within 2019-2021 will not appear on either the ‘with’ or ‘without’ report.

Often when a POE reinstates a member, they do not change the Joined Date. Remember, if the member did not pay dues and were inactive until the next calendar year or beyond, you need to change their Joined Date when they reinstate to treat them as a new member so if you have someone considered a new member who is appearing on the ‘without’ report, check their Joined Date in NRDS.

Training at Annual Convention

As you know, in years past during NAR’s “in person” Convention we would hold an Ecommerce session as well as a NRDS Deep Dive session for our AEs and association staff attending the Annual Convention.

This year our Annual Convention has gone virtual, but we will still be holding these training sessions online.

Ecommerce: Tuesday November 10 from 10:00 – 11:30 Central time

During this session we will spend the first 30 minutes on the reports available in Ecommerce. We have a variety of reports you can use to reconcile to your bank statement, reconcile to reports from your AMS, reports to review your EFT activity, reports for chargebacks as well as several search functions. For the last hour we will concentrate on the Invoicing dues templates so our smallest boards who use the Invoicing module will see a walk through of setting up a billing year, dues items, disclaimers, billing notices and more.

NRDS Deep Dive: Tuesday November 10 from noon to 2:00 pm Central time.

This will be your opportunity for a ‘deep dive’ into the functions and policies of tracking member information in NRDS including updating Association records and leadership, important deadlines for member counts, tracking non member licensees for the Dues Formula, managing office records as well as large firms for Director counts, following the standards for Member Type and Member Status, Joined Date, Secondary Members, Transfer Members, and much more.

IMPORTANT NOTE: you do not need to register specifically for these sessions, However, to attend you must be registered for the NAR Annual Convention. Once you are registered for the Convention you can attend these or any other Convention sessions that are available.

To register for the NAR Convention, be sure to visit the registration site at https://www.conference.realtor/

Once you have registered, when you enter their portal to attend the Convention, you will find the links to attend the sessions including the Ecommerce and NRDS Deep Dive ones.

Institute Affiliate Members

Frequently asked questions on IA (Institute Affiliate members):

For someone who holds one of our commercial designations: ALC, CCIM, CPM, CRE or SIOR – they must still be a member but they can elect to join as an Institute Affiliate rather than as a Realtor.

Most choose to join as a Realtor and at this time there are about 9,000 IA members.

The POE for IA members are the institutes themselves (RLI, CCIM, IREM, CRE and SIOR). When they award their designation, they check to see if the person is already an active Realtor. If not, they then set the person up in NRDS as an IA member.

IA members cannot use the term Realtor. They cannot serve as President of your board. They cannot participate in the MLS. State and Local associations are not obligated to provide them with any services.

IA members do not have Board of Choice. If their office is located in the jurisdiction of a Commercial association, that becomes their Primary local. If there is no Commercial association, the Institute POE assigns their Primary Local based on their Office address and adds them to NRDS. The Primary Local and State are informed the next day via your NRDS Daily Changes report, Member Add section.

The IA member dues is set by NAR’s Board of Directors. The annual dues is $105 and just like your Realtor members the dues are due by January 1 with a grace period to March 31. Dues are also prorated monthly for new IA members.

The dues are split three ways to the National, the State association and the member’s Primary local association.

IA members can only pay their dues online via Ecommerce. When they pay the money goes out electronically. It updates the IA member’s Financial record in NRDS and the money shows on your Ecommerce report – Group Summary/Detail in the section for Institute Affiliate dues.

If you need to know who, if any, your IA members are, from the NRDS menu select Find a Member. On that search screen under Member Type select Institute Affiliate and in the Association ID field enter your local association’s 4 digit association ID and search.

More Insights Dashboards Coming Soon

Be sure to check out your emails for information on more Insights Dashboards coming to your main menu. Within the next couple of weeks, we will be implementing dashboards for Demographics (nation wide and for your association) as well as dashboards for Designations, Certifications and Endorsements (ie C2EX). Once these are live, we will send out notices.