Real Estate School
The Real Estate School by Lieb at Law, P.C. is a free school offering continuing education credits for real estate professionals and technical education for New York residents. To register click here
This is the story of how our school was born. It was the end of 2007 and the real estate market was screeching to a sudden halt. No closings were coming into our firm after more than 30 years of continuous real estate practice. Fortunately, we were a general practice law firm so we could weather the storm, but what about the local realtors in our community? What would they do? So an associate and I decided that it was time to go out and ask realtors how we could help them. We made chocolate chip cookies and went from office to office and asked. They complained about the economy, but when we persisted, we learned that they wanted to learn new skills. They wanted help learning to do short sales. They wanted to know about foreclosures. They were ready to expand their practices in order to survive. We wanted to help.
Fast forward to the summer of 2008.
Our firm had a high school intern who needed a project. During that previous year, the firm had dabbled in seminars, as many firms do, but we wanted to be different, we wanted to give more than a solicitation for business. Our intern was bright, a friend of the family, and needed to do something dynamic for his college applications. The firm had just re-branded from a general practice to a focus on real estate. Also at that time, I was doubling up between managing our firm and teaching as an adjunct professor at Nassau Community College, which required a commute of over an hour that I could do without. All the pieces seemed to be in place to answer the realtors’ calls for help; we were ready to open our school.
So the intern came into my office on his first day and said: “what should I do?” and I responded: “I want you to do something special. I was also an intern here, so I know that my father is going to have you getting coffee and doing filing in about 10 minutes if we don’t have you started on a different project right away. We both know you can’t do many legal things because you don’t know the law, but you are a smart kid. So I have 3 ideas that I have been meaning to get started and you can pick 1 and make that your summer project.” Needless to say the intern picked the school. He started by researching on the Department of State’s website and learning the requirements to get the requisite credentials. Next, he got me licensed as a Real Estate Instructor. Thereafter, he met with local realtors and asked them how we can best service their needs. He surveyed them and then analyzed the results. As the project got more and more underway, we began to realize that we had come up with something great. It fulfilled so many objectives that we wanted to accomplish with our firm. My father, the founder of our firm, always talks to our employees about the importance of pro-bono work. My grandfather was an active member of our community, as a local merchant, and prided himself on giving back. The Liebs are a family who believe that “Its nice to be nice”. So helping 3 or 4 community members on their legal issues was just not cutting our pro bono goals anymore. Instead, we realized that if we taught realtors how to minimize their clients’ exposure to legal problems during a real estate transaction, we could help thousands of people in just a little more time than we were currently spending on helping those 3 or 4. Its simple math, if we train 10 realtors who each work with 100 clients we have impacted 1,000 people’s lives. It’s a win-win.
Now more than a year into this project we are moving forward on all cylinders. We are currently offering 3 classes at 3 credits each, including: Foreclosure and the Economy: the short sale class; Mold is Money; and Intro to Commercial Real Estate. If you are interested in what we have to teach, the school welcomes the general public to our classes. Advanced registration is required. To register click here