By: Vice President of Political Operations, Anthony Reedy

As of December 1, 2019, the VREB has worked through more than half of the regulations in Chapter 20 of the Virginia Administrative Code, and at this point there have been no major concerns with any of the proposals. The main focus behind this regulatory review has been to reduce regulations by 25% and to make the language less duplicative and easier to understand.

Some of the more significant changes up to this point have been to topics available for CE credit (e.g. 10 topics have been added), place of business, escrow, and advertising. With place of business and advertising specifically, the goal has been to generalize the language so that it doesn’t outdate itself (i.e. with social media terms, changing business models, emerging technology, etc.).

The process so far has been for the VREB subcommittee to review each regulation line by line, with the help of Virginia REALTORS®’ attorneys, and produce redlined changes. Those redlines are then circulated for additional comments from the subcommittee members. We are still very early in the regulatory review process. This will be a multi-year process where any proposed changes will go to the full VREB, public comment, and eventually up to the Governor. The VREB subcommittee has worked very closely with our association up to this point and has looked to us for research, language, and general guidance. All of the proposed changes so far have been presented to our own regulatory review subcommittee (part of the public policy committee) for review.