The person tracking the deadlines on a Texas home sale — handling the contract, reading the proof of funds, sitting on the email chain with the title company — often holds no real estate license, has passed no background check and answers to no particular broker. A state advisory committee voted Oct. 7 to start changing that.
The Broker Responsibility Advisory Committee asked the Texas Real Estate Commission to make every brokerage write these people into its rulebook. Brokerages must keep written policies covering eight required subjects; a staff attorney said there is “nothing specific for unlicensed assistance or or transaction coordination” among them. The motion asks for a ninth, or for the subject folded into an existing one, so a brokerage must state whether its agents may hire outside help, who may be hired, what that person may touch and who pays them. Staff said that is a rule change, not one needing the Legislature. Marvin Jolly moved it, Bob Baker seconded, and it passed on a show of hands with no count taken.
The pressure for it came in public comment, from a Houston broker who says she learned what the gap costs. Shelly Scanlin said an investigation into a woman who began as her transaction coordinator and was later promoted to office manager “identified what authorities allege was a scheme involving more than 120 commission checks payable to my company that were diverted and deposited into a personal bank account over approximately 2 years”. She put the alleged loss at “approximately” $466,000; prosecutors put it above $460,000 at the June arrest, ABC13 Houston reported. The defendant, whom the Dispatch is not naming because her case is pending, is charged with first-degree felony theft, and Scanlin said a Montgomery County grand jury indicted her in August. “The criminal case remains pending and she is entitled to the protections of that process,” Scanlin told the committee.
Her point was about timing, not sympathy. The alleged scheme, she said, began before the office job: “the theft started when she was a transaction coordinator”, when the access was the ordinary access of the role. A coordinator in that seat sees contracts, confidential agreements, client contact details and, in her case, the commission disbursement authorization — the instruction telling the title company how to split the money at closing. A disclosure telling consumers one is on the file is progress, not a remedy, she argued: it “does not create accountability”, and “does not create a licensing history. It does not create a background check.”
The industry she is describing answered. The owner of a coordinator company, who said he is a licensed Texas broker with 22 contractors across several states, about half licensed, said the debate had tipped: “I feel like transaction coordinators are being villainized. I really do.” His objection: the rule would catch people like him and miss the person sitting in the brokerage. Unlicensed assistants and admins, he said, “have the same exact insight into information that I do as a now licensed TC, but I’m being forced to carry a license and they’re not. I’m being forced to be background checked and they’re not.”
Members made the practical case against going further. Requiring every coordinator to be licensed and tied to one broker is not how the business runs, one said — “virtually every TC that I’m aware of that works with our company works with other companies”, several overseas — and a one-broker rule “would cause some TC companies to go out of business”. Another member had spent the previous week hearing four national errors-and-omissions insurers name the claims they see coming: seller fraud, car wrecks, artificial intelligence, cyber. “We didn’t hear anything about lawsuits regarding transaction coordinators or admin people. So, I’m still curious if we have how big the problem is,” he said. Nobody had a number, and the commission collects none.
So the committee took the small step and deferred the large one. The consumer disclosure — what Scanlin came for, and what the committee asked the Broker-Lawyer Committee to draft back in April — was tabled, members unable to agree whether it should be a mandatory state form, a disclosure in any format a brokerage chooses, or a paragraph added to an existing form. Vice-chair Brian Sales said the committee had “made progress uh with the policies and procedures um and agreeing that we need to notify the consumer”, but “How we go about doing that is is still open-ended and u really deserves and requires more discussion.”
Whether coordinators should need a license at all went further still: members treated that as a question for the Legislature, and nobody moved it. What did pass goes to the nine-member commission, which decides whether to open a rulemaking. The committee meets again Jan. 13.
A third meeting on inactive licenses, and a third postponement. A Texas agent who stops working can park a license on inactive status, pay the renewal fee and take no continuing education at all; on returning, staff confirmed, the agent owes only the current two-year cycle’s courses and never has to catch up on the ones missed. The chair, Ty Williams, said an agent who had missed roughly two and a half renewals sent one of his agents an offer two weeks earlier on a contract form so old it predated a paragraph now standard in it. A member pressed back twice that no data shows inactive agents generate complaints, and staff conceded they do not track how long licenses sit idle, offering to find out. The item was tabled to January, as it was in April and July. The licensing portal has stabilized. Staff reported call hold times of two to four minutes, 24-to-48-hour email turnaround and seven-to-10-day application processing, with course certificates now uploaded by education providers rather than applicants.