Hi Everyone,

I'm currently taking my California pre-license courses online. The course I chose is really horrible - poorly written PDF books and nothing else (i got what I paid for unfortunately). Does anyone know of a GOOD online course for CA?

Any help will be most appreciated!

Thanks,
Joe

I did all of my licensing courses for both by salesperson and broker at http://www.californialicense.com ... Paid extra for physical books for my broker courses (they were standard when I did my salesperson). Good material and I passed both state exams the first time I took them.

While not in California, my online school stunk as well. For 55 bucks, I bought the book that went along with the course. This was FAR easier to use than clicking through hundreds of slides. Best wishes!

[quote=BaddestCross]I did all of my licensing courses for both by salesperson and broker at http://www.californialicense.com ... Paid extra for physical books for my broker courses (they were standard when I did my salesperson). Good material and I passed both state exams the first time I took them. [/quote]

Thanks for the reply! I will check them out.

[quote=FSBO]While not in California, my online school stunk as well. For 55 bucks, I bought the book that went along with the course. This was FAR easier to use than clicking through hundreds of slides. Best wishes! [/quote]

Thanks FSBO! I have a book (not part of the course) that I ordered, so maybe it will be easier to study from the book and just use the course exams to satisfy my CA education requirements.

Thanks!

I hate to sound like a killjoy, but I suspect you'll find the online courses to be fairly similar from company to company. There's really only so much you can do with a self-study, online course to begin with. The online companies tend to compete primarily on price, so you really aren't going to find a whole lot of innovation between one school and the next.

I used Allied Schools for my coursework, and while they were good enough to get me to pass my broker's exam on my first try, I can't say I was "wowed" by the content. Then again, how interesting can you actually make, say, an escrow course? (I did find their customer service to be reasonably good, though...and they did actually send me hard-copy books, which have occasionally been useful to refer back to.)

Regardless of whose classes you take, the stuff you REALLY need to know to be a successful real estate agent is the stuff you're not going to learn until after you pass the exam anyway.

I agree that most of the online courses will be similar.

Here is what I did to pass the CA exam:

1. Make flashcards of all of the terms. It gets to be big pile. go through them everyday until you master them.

2. go to the library and get all of the exam books for the CA test. go through all of the tests several times until you get over 90%. I was surprised to see many of the questions from the exam books on the actual test.

Good Luck!

Thank you guys for some great info! I really do appreciate it. Flash Cards of the terms seems pretty helpful and doing practice tests makes perfect sense. Now if I can just unscramble all this info in my brain long enough to get through the exam!

Thanks!
Joe

The national part is multiple choice. This saved my bacon on a couple of items...

FSBO, what's the format of the state component in Louisiana? Here in California, it's all multiple choice...Definitely reassuring since you know the correct answer is right there in front of you.

My wife is studying for her license now. She is using materials from www.firsttuesday.us. I have read through some of it, and the material is average at best. But the best part of this course is it comes with a test-prep course with a cd that has hundreds of actual test questions on it. If you study and memorize all of those questions and answers, you should pass the exam easily. The entire course cost something like $175.

Even if you stay with your current course materials, I would recommend you buy the test preparation course.

The state courses are more of a formality and only cover principles, contracts, agency, ethics, etc. They don’t differ very much in what they offer so pick the one you like best.

Here is a site that has a list of schools to choose from so you can compare features and price. Exam prep is a must so you have an idea of what will be on the exam. Good luck!

http://www.realestatewebschools.com/

Andy,
The state portion was MC as well. But sadly, most of the questions covered how much board members got to eat on each day. As in 5-7 questions!
Even though our system of law is VERY different from the rest of the country, many of the questions were on silly items. Actually this is was good practice for real world real estate!

try Allied schools. reasonable and they make it very easy

TrainingPro is the biggest in the nation, not to mention they just bought ProSchools, the second biggest in the nation, lol.

I know they have reputable programs so you might want to check with them. But then again they made this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3gplSGhkH4) so you might not want to go through them ;)

http://www.trainingpro.com/December-31-2010/nmls-training.html is one of their sites.