This presentation teaches you how to be listed on MassLandlords.net as a Certified Massachusetts Landlord™ and pass our test. This new professional designation is available to current, new and prospective owners and managers of Massachusetts residential real estate. We explain:

• Why certification matters to:
  • State politics, and
  • Your bottom line.
• Three levels of certification
• In-depth review of the Level One commitments
• Live demo of the test
• Recommended reading and/or course work
• A few sample questions
• How to use our certification imagery
• Enforcement
• Advertising

Viewers will understand how to enroll as cML Level One™ and how to prepare for the test.

Images like this are available to use by Certified Massachusetts Landlords in business ads, websites, etc. 

Slides, Past Video and Training Material

Certified Massachusetts Landlord Level Two Test

Presenter:

Douglas Quattrochi

[Start 0:00:00]

Presentation

My name is Doug Quattrochi. I’m the executive director of MassLandlords and we’ll get started with our webinar for this afternoon..

Our goal today is to give you an idea of what certification is. These bullets, we use some slides we presented before, so it may look familiar, but we’ll move on to new content pretty quickly. We’re going to talk about why our certification program is important and what the Certified Massachusetts Landlord entails.

There are four test modules that are live on the site now and we’ll explain basically how that works and how to access them, and I’ll do a live demo. I’ll show you basically where you would create your profile, although I won’t create a profile live because we have done that in the past. I’ll explain how to get certified, and then I’ll actually do some live test questions with my account. I am not yet a CML Level 2 just for the purpose of this demo, so we can show you kind of what this process will look like. Then we’ll have plenty of time for questions. I anticipate we may end early and this webinar will be recorded on the site for other folks to watch and see what we’re up to.

What is certification? The Certified Massachusetts Landlord is a new program that’s built into our core membership at MassLandlords. It’s new to Massachusetts, and as far as I know it’s new to the country. There are lots of property manager certifications and they’re very valuable and worth looking at, but there aren’t any that are jurisdiction specific, meaning they ask you about specific laws and compliance in certain areas, and you see that as an issue potentially when large interstate companies move employees to Massachusetts. We’re heavily regulated here, so the CML really is designed to help you feel confident that you know the laws in Massachusetts and also help us to vouch for you to prospective renters.

If you pay dues, you can be certified. It’s completely optional though, so if you don’t want to do the certification, you don’t have to. You can still be a member paying dues, get access to the forms, Home Depot savings, message boards and all that. But if you want to take advantage of it, it’s here.

The first version of certification applies to individuals only, so what this means is even if you have an LLC and other people work with you, the certification is going to be your professional profile for Massachusetts residential real estate, and it will only apply to you. It doesn’t certify your LLC or your other team members, although that’s something we’ll be working on in the future. I’ll point out that our membership dues will explain more in a subsequent slide but our membership dues are switching to be per business, so if you do have an LLC with multiple people working with you or any other corporate forum partnership, etc., one payment of dues based on the number of units you own will allow each person to certify for no additional cost as part of the member for the parent organization.

We’ll talk about what this means and we’ll talk about what these two levels are, but just to give you an idea upfront, Level One is the promise to follow best practices and Level Two is the tests that just launched last month and that’s we’re going to be focused on today. First though before, I heap more work onto your plate, I know we’re all very busy as residential owners and managers, let me just remind us about why real estate is a great business to be in.

It’s the only business where you have access to this tremendous leverage. Now once you’re up and running, you don’t get access to the FHA loan, but if you want to get started you can get an FHA loan for as little as 3.5 percent down and that’s not available anywhere else. You can’t start a factory with that little in it, and in general it’s easy to get into real estate.

It’s also a really tangible asset. We know land is restricted and zoning is restrictive as well, so houses always tend to go up in value over time absent some huge regulatory shake up.

If inflation is a problem it hasn’t been the last couple years but we’re watching it, it may be soon and the dollar becomes worth less, you can raise the rent and keep up with inflation, never mind the appreciation of your core asset.

We do have tremendous tax advantages real estate that recognize how our expenditures are very lumpy. We might have huge expenses in a short period of time and then we need to be able to count that against income going forward.

In general, real estate is a huge way for us to secure our futures, how a lot of our members insure for their retirement, for schooling for kids just to be able to have a measure of independence or security.

Real estate’s really worth putting the effort into and the certification is a little bit of effort, and in Massachusetts it’s really worth doing the certification as well because there’s a very high bar set for landlords here that does not apply elsewhere in the country. For instance, in Massachusetts you might have a single plumber visit cost you a month’s rent because licensed plumbers are in short supply. There’s a minimum show-up fee and then there’s a high hourly rate. It can be very expensive to do things correctly.

We have a difficult summer winter seasonal change here that some other states don’t have to deal with. It means we have an uneven workload. We have to be cognizant to the fact if we want a team running uh across the year, they have to do different things potentially or have different emphasis depending on whether they can work outside.

[0:05:38]

Zoning is really difficult here in Massachusetts. You might be an expert in one town, you try to invest in a property another town over and suddenly there are different trash rules and noise ordinances and you can’t convert to condos. Each city or town is different, and the state level of course I think we all know it’s very tough to operate here. Security deposits are a minefield for the unprepared.

Discrimination is something that some when it’s enforced extremely expensive to deal with and of course we don’t want to discriminate but sometimes we slip up or accidents happen.

Lead paint of course, we have a lot of really old housing stock. It’s never safe for kids to live in a house with lead poisoning regardless of whether the landlord knows about the lead or not.

Of course recently in the early days of the pandemic we were sharply disrespected with this unfunded eviction moratorium. No paycheck protection program, no mortgage forgiveness for us so we really have to make sure we have our stuff together overall.

Certification can help us to prepare and also it helps us to say we’re different from the folks that you’re trying to regulate because we’re doing the right thing anyways.

I want to point out something that’s very positive with MassLandlords emphasizing what a good job typical small mom-and-pop landlords do, we’ve been able to climb the mountain of political influence and media appearances especially over the last year during the pandemic. Although we don’t have the level of budget that one of these renter advocacy groups do and they are state funded and they use it to ensure their status in the state remains the same, we are becoming influential at least at the level of public perception and that will in turn result in policies and proposals, and other solutions to future problems that involve us from the outset as opposed to the eviction moratorium.

So really to tie up all this introductory stuff, the goal of certification is to have a market-based credential that we can choose to participate in by which we’ll hold ourselves to a high standard; differentiate ourselves from folks who don’t know what they’re doing in real estate; encourage the people who don’t know what they’re doing to come learn from us and to be successful; make us a more credible policy advocate; and really make Massachusetts the best place to own and to rent and they’re not mutually exclusive.

I want to put one more preparatory comment toward licensing. We can’t move to a system in Massachusetts where we have mandatory licensing because rental real estate is the way a lot of us get up and out of situations where we don’t have permission. We don’t have a college degree or high educational payment or investment from someone, so we can buy a house and potentially improve our situation.

Also license fees go to the state which isn’t an expert landlord. The state isn’t equipped to teach landlording the way we are, and in general licensing applies in other contexts where like for instance in real estate it’s tough. In plumbing, it might be easier. You might apprentice as an apprentice plumber to get your license with someone working 9:00 to 5:00. You follow what they do. You learn how it works but the landlords who get started here and in general everywhere, we work nights and weekends until we decide to go full time, and then we tend to work nine to five so there’s no time where the learners’ schedules line up with the experienced people’s schedule such that you could have a licensure or apprenticeship program.

Of course we don’t want to increase costs in any way for renters because housing is too expensive already, so we want to deliver more value for the same price if we can, and that’s part of why certification is priced into dues.

There are three levels here.

Level One Best Practices. I explained at the outset and we’ll show that on the screen momentarily.

Level Two is the test of basic legal and business competence. We’re just calling it the test really.

Then Level Three is being worked on now. That’s stuff like what you’re doing here. You come to a webinar, you learn. You get credit for it, and by getting credit for continuing education you can have a certification that looks current all the time.

[0:10:00]

Let me go through these levels in detail, and if you already know great and we’ll get to Level Two in a second.

Level One is called provisional because it’s a commitment to follow best practices including taking the test. You have 18 months from the time you first become level 1 to pass the test, although note no one who became Level One before the test was live. It’s close to lapsing. We’re starting that 18-month counter for when the tests went live last month, so still plenty of time for everybody.

I’ll show you the list of best practices, but it’s pretty easy stuff. It’s promised to you know work through problems with renters, hire the right people, know what you’re doing all stuff you want to do anyways.

Now Level Two what we’ll talk most about today is this test, so you have to be Level One, and then on top of it you pass the test and we’ll give you real examples in a second, but the example in the slide here is just to ask, “Likely the costliest environmental hazard in any building built before 1978 will be ___?” Is it mold, lead, radon, or asbestos? The clue here is if you’ve studied the lead regs, you’ll know that lead was banned in 1978 so the correct answer here is lead, although any of those other things could be costly and they could be hazardous. The correct answer to this question is intended to be lead. We’ll do a lot of demo in a second.

Then for Level Three here, we’ve got continuing ed. These are the attendance cards we used to have back before the pandemic. We hope to be back in person at a level where everyone’s safe and enjoying themselves, but at least right now, I hope you know you can go to MassLandlords.net/beep and beep in the way we used to with the old cards.

The requirement for Level Three so that your certification shows not only the year you first certified but also the present year, let’s say for the sake of this slide that is 2024, is that you have 10 hours of education in the past 12 months. This goal was set with physical events where networking time was included, so you’d have to do five two-hour events to meet your objective. Now with these short virtual meetings or kind of things as an hour that might be you know 10 events might be a little bit much depending on how much education you need but that’s where it stands now and certainly if we do a virtual meeting that has networking time and you’re there from 5:00 to 7:00 you’ll get two hours that way. Just got to make sure you beep in or out to get credit for that.

To summarize, and I’ll start to slow down here as we get into the new material, we have three levels of certification.

We have the provisional level where you promised to do the right thing and that’s been online since actually October 2019, but it never really got marketed well because we were waiting for the tests and then the pandemic happened.

Level Two is live now as well, just went live last month when you become Level Two, it will put the year you first became certified into your designation and this Level Two is no longer provisional. Once you become Level Two it’s permanent. We can’t take that away from you at one time you pass the test.

Now some certification programs out there in the world require you to retest every year or two. We decided we didn’t see the value in that, as long as you were coming to engage with our material read, our newsletters attend our events once in a while for the topics that you find interesting where you want to brush up yourself and as long as you do that and engage with us at some minimum level, you’ll always have the permanent 2021 or Level Two certification and it will always show the current year.

Just to be clear if someone joins us next year and certifies in 2022, their first year first year here will show 2022, so anyone who’s in the program early will always have a kind of rank over other landlords and people say, “You know, I was the first to certify back when it first started in 2021. So that’s how it’s going to work.

This Level Three should go live. It says August here. We are working on it probably won’t go live until September, but there’s very little left to be done.

Here’s how the test works.

There are four modules. Those modules parallel the four commitments that we will show on screen in a minute. Talk to tenants; maintain buildings; be part of the community; and follow the law. There are approximately 150 questions in our bank per each module, about 600 700 total. For each module, you’ll have to answer between 20 and 30 questions. It depends on your answers. If you know what you’re doing and very quickly have a high score, the test will tend to stop asking earlier and say, “Okay, confident that you know what you’re doing, you’re done.” Likewise, if you’re not well prepared, it will say pretty early, “Okay pretty clear you need to study. Let’s take a break.”

Then the 30-question range or so is if it can’t tell under no circumstance will anyone be asked to answer more than 40 questions. We’ll time out at that point say, “Study more so you get a faster score.” We don’t want to make this an elaborate thing. It’s not like you have to go into a proctored environment and take a test for four hours. We’re just trying to get this done online. What I was talking about there is it is adaptive, so I’ll do a demo of this live soon.

[0:15:20]

Let me just point out some things.

This certification applies to individuals, which I mentioned before, so when you make a profile your individual name is going to appear in it. The best practice is if you want to list the company so that people can search for it, you can put your company name into the name field there you. You just got to have your name as well. Here Brian is a good example. Belaire Property Management is his company he doesn’t tell people in his ad Brian Lucier is the landlord. He tells people Belaire Property Management is the landlord. That’s still enough for them to look up Belaire Property Management on our site. Of course, we want you to have a picture so you stand out and look positive and that’s his logo there.

Now we are going to work on certifying businesses, but that’s going to be a little bit different. I don’t want to get too much into that now, but it’s going to pertain to record keeping, applicant qualifiers, making sure you screen people in a consistent order and just to be continued on that. You can do a lot with the individual certification.

If you do get individually certified, you can use that in your business and say, “You know, I’m a certified Massachusetts landlord,” or “The person who’s managing this property is a certified Massachusetts landlord, and you can link in that ad to your profile directly at MassLandlords.net. We can also encourage people to search for you online and verify that you are certified.

What we’re hoping to do as we switch the dues, which I’ll talk about in the next slide, as we switch the dues we’re going to do advertising so if someone searches for you My Business LLC or whatever your business is called on Google, we will have a little thing pop up that shows them this landlord is verified or verify this landlord, so that’ll be helpful for all of us to get more traction and credibility. Obviously we tend to list on specific platforms like Zillow Rental Manager or Apartments.com, but if someone is searching Google, it can be very hard to rank there but MassLandlords can get you to rank.

Two more slides and then we’ll move to the demo.

We’ve been talking about this for the better part of a year now. We will be changing the dues, so for certification we need to enforce it and make sure that only the people who are actually certified are saying so and only the units owned or managed by a certified landlord have the certification logo on it. We’re going to have to understand more closely which properties you own and manage and also the benefit of this kind of scales with the units you own, so we’re going to switch from a per person pricing to a per units owned or managed pricing. If you don’t want to disclose how many units you own or manage or where they are, then you won’t be able to certify, but you will be able to access all the other benefits for the base price of dues.

That’s coming um basically this fall. We’ll be able to say my company is a member or my sole proprietorship is a member whichever way it doesn’t matter, and then anyone who works with you will have access to the certification program like that.

Just lest anyone panic here if you’re already on auto renew, we’re not going to turn that off so everyone’s going to be effectively grandfathered for at least one renewal cycle when we make this change.

I want to just give a personal anecdote and say how this helps. I know many of us are in markets where our renters don’t care if we’re certified, and they’ll rent an apartment from us if only we’ll take them, and it’s up to us at MassLandlords to make the certification more impactful in the market, but I rent what I consider a top market apartment for Worcester and I put the certification image that I could download from MassLandlords in my ad and I think it was effective at convincing qualified people to want to apply for the apartment because this stood out when they were looking through the pictures.

Now I didn’t lead with the certification. I led with my kitchen, which you can’t see there because that’s usually a selling point, but the certification is in there so even if they don’t read through the text that you might have described in the property, everybody flips through every picture, and so that’s a real powerful benefit to be able to say I’m certified and to put that in the picture carousel to attract the best possible renters.

With that, let me just flip over to the q a briefly if I can see it. I don’t see anything there, so we’ll move on with the live demo and for this now I will uh exit the slide show and I will pull up a web page here. I’ll move that on to I’ve got two monitors so you’ll see me looking off to the side.

First just a quick note. Anyone who visits the MassLandlord’s homepage will see the option down here to find a certified Massachusetts landlord or check certification before you rent. That page just takes you back to the search page, which I’ve preloaded to try to minimize the time we spend waiting for pages to load. If someone knows that I’m the landlord, I did write my ad with my name in it. I said, “This is rented by Doug Quattrochi. Verify at MassLandlords.net.”

[0:20:20]

If someone types in that last name, they’ll see everyone who matches the search results, and they’ll see the profile that I have and they’ll see that I’m certified, so that’s a good third-party validation. This landlord probably knows what they’re doing. If there was any doubt as to which apartment they should apply for, they’re going to want mine more. Obviously some renters won’t mind, but as folks start to learn about this, it will matter, so that’s public. Once you create a profile you can be seen like that.

Now once you’re logged on the site as an actual member, you have the access to the My Account page and you can edit your professional profile there. For instance if I were to click this, it would take me to that result from the lookup page we just looked at.

The site is a little bit slow and my computer is a little bit underpowered, but we know basically pages shouldn’t be taking order 10 seconds to load so we’re going to work on it, but just bear with us for the sake of this demo.

You can edit your professional profile. You can’t change the logo that’s something assigned automatically, Level One versus Level Two or Three. You can edit your name. You could put in whatever the company is, Happy Farm is a state LLC or whatever it is that you wanted to list your business name. That’s not my LLC, but just for the sake of example you could do that.

You could swap out your profile picture. You could add a description, put in a picture. That’s my front yard put that in makes. It looks like a real person you know because we won’t want to stand out.

You can list contact details. You can have your email visible to other members, but if you check this box, then it becomes visible to the public as well theoretically. It might be locked up there, and then you know you’ve got a mailing address. I don’t publish my mailing address on the site, but I do say I’m in Worcester so I haven’t filled in lines one or two there.

I say how many units I own just for other members so they can get a sense for my service provider recommendations like if I recommend a landscaper that’s a different part of the site and not something particularly that we’re going to go over from today, but this profile serves double duty for both certification and interacting with other members. That’s useful and can be edited anytime once you certify.

How do you get started?

You go to Resources here. Even if you don’t have a profile, everybody has the resources menu and you go to certification, and this will have a bunch of buttons on it that appear and disappear depending on your status. Given that I’m CML Level One here, I’ll see some things that I hope you all will see, too. I hope you’re all CML Level One already. For instance, it’ll say you meet the requirements to be a certified Massachusetts landlord Level One and there’s a link back to your profile in case you couldn’t find it. This is where you get the graphics for the ad. I showed you the picture I had posted I’m a certified landlord, that’s where that is. You can see what you agreed to.

Here’s the best practices. Now if you’re not a Level One and you’re coming out this cold, you can see the best practices. It’ll be the most obvious button there on the page, and what it will do is take you to this site here where you can look at the different promises we make to prepare to be responsible regarding maintenance and capital improvements to maintain effective tenancies, you know basically act in a way that will further your interest as a landlord. Then there’s the actual certification agreement.

I’m going to assume that you’ve all seen that, but if you haven’t, it’ll walk you through it. The main thing we want to focus on today is this test and we have Level Three as a placeholder, but this is not live yet.

As a Level One landlord, the test shows me that I can start the certification test here with this big orange button. I’m going to open that in a new tab and let it load, and again it does take a minute and this test will show us the four modules that we have – Talking to Tenants, Maintaining Buildings, Following the Law, and Being Part of the Community.

There’s a video. This is very meta. There’s a video of me doing a video, but you can watch that. It’s just a minute and a half and explains in detail how the test works. There’s also written instructions if you like to do that here. Let me just scroll up and down the page four modules.

Talk to Tenants and there’s kind of the orange button that starts a test and there’s a little status box. I’ve already done the talk to tenants module so I have passed it.

Maintain buildings, I haven’t passed it. It says you can retake it.

Be part of the community, same thing. Took it, failed it. Now you can retake it, and then follow the law as well. I did pass that one and there’s some FAQ at the bottom.

Let me just do a real example here.

We’ve done Talk to Tenants already I’m going to do maintain buildings because I think it’ll give us some stuff to talk about.

[0:25:18]

Before I click the button though, let me just point out one more thing that you see here. These are the constant groups or the focus areas that are in the test, so for instance before you take the Talk to Tenants module, you might want to learn how to avoid discrimination on the basis of ancestry. For instance if somebody says you know I’m Native American or my ancestors came on the Mayflower, you can say that’s wonderful but you can’t consider that in an application as a landlord because that would be discrimination on the basis of ancestry.

Some things are linked like if you say how to use eviction records to screen applicants fairly you can open that and you can read an article on our site. Don’t even have to be a member to read this one and it’ll walk you through everything that the test covers. For instance, that constant group is using eviction records to screen applicants fairly, and here we’ve got this article that talks about all the things we would ask about on the test, so if you know what’s linked from the test page you should be good for those questions on the test.

Obviously a lot of these things are not linked yet, and we’re working on articles all the time so for instance I know there’s a gender identity article coming up. That’s basically if someone is transgender or identifies as male but is born female or vice versa or is gender fluid and prefers not to have any particular set of pronouns he or she applied to them, so there’ll be an article about that, and there’s lots of good stuff on all of this, which is all relevant.

Now let’s just talk about relevance under the Maintain Buildings section here. For instance, we’ve got an article on the Federal repair, renovate, paint regs, RRP. You might have a building that was built in 2000, never lead paint. It wasn’t lead paint with inside of that building for the 22 years before it was built, so you might not think lead paint regs matter, but I don’t know if I’m going to vouch for you whether you’re going to buy an old building in the future so at least at this point of passing the test we want everybody to know about lead paint even if it doesn’t apply.

Similar under following the laws right so we’ve got lots of stuff on taking last month’s rent in advance. That’s not something I do. I think it’s confusing for people. They forget whether they paid I forget whether they paid. I don’t do that but I have to know how to do it correctly to pass the test.

All right, let’s start this I’ve been talking enough. Let’s actually go down. We can click launch test module Maintain Buildings. These are going to be live questions here. Each one is going to be timed. We’re going to have 90 seconds to answer. If we don’t finish the answer in time, the test won’t end but we won’t get credit for answering it correctly.

This first question. “Landlords who wish to replace a lead paint covered door can do so ___” and these always vary. They’re random. “After becoming a licensed de-leader; anytime; never, after taking 12 hours of training, or after taking an online test.”

I like this question for the purpose of this webinar because it allows us to show where the test needs to be improved. This question does not have a context. It’s not saying if you’re trying to get a de-leading certificate. If you don’t care about a de-lead cert, and you don’t ever intend to get it, then you can replace the lead paint covered door anytime, but if you want that to count for de-leading to eventually get a lead certificate, you had better not replace that door until at least you’ve taken an online test because that’s the low-risk -de-leading requirement in Massachusetts.

This question, we’ve seen experienced people get wrong so far in our early testing because they’re thinking about that difference and they’re saying well it doesn’t say I want to see let’s start so the correct answer is anytime and they’re right, but the question expected this answer and it wasn’t written fully correctly. If you see anything like this and you’re very knowledgeable and you say you know what there are two right answers here you can always add that comment and it will automatically save the feedback.

Now note because I’ve been blabbing, we ran out of time and it says that “You ran out of time on this question. Feel free to submit feedback. Press submit when you’re ready to move on.”

Okay, let’s move on, submit. I didn’t get that one right. Perhaps I couldn’t have. I want you to know that we’re constantly updating these test questions so when we see things like that especially in the comments, we make a tweak. That last item was pointed out to us just last week, so we haven’t fixed it yet.

Here’s another lead question. Now, it was asking about lead because we got the other led one wrong perhaps and so it was trying to find out hey do you know what’s going on here. “Massachusetts law places landlords into catch-22. A child under the age of six cannot live in an apartment with lead hazards but you cannot ___.”

[0:30:16]

What can’t we do? “Require children to use only certain rooms. De-lead with children in a unit. Discriminate against families with children. Ask for the age of child applicants.” The correct answer here and I’m giving away the answer here is we cannot discriminate against children, so basically we can’t have them living in lead apartments. We can’t turn them away. We have to de-lead. That’s catch-22.

I won’t type anything in. You don’t have to provide feedback I’ll just click submit. The test will look at that. It knows whether I got the question right or not. It doesn’t tell me and it serves me the next question. I got the first one wrong due to timeout so it estimated my ability as lower than average. Then I got the second one right. I probably brought it right back up to average so okay maybe this is an average person who’s going to pass. It’s switching gears on us.

“A landlord might install utility submeters in order to ___.”

Why would you want submeters? “Initiate an eviction process; reduce utility usage and improve efficiency; encourage tenants to improve their hygiene; or stop tenants from using utilities.”

All right, well I think you want submeters to reduce usage and improve efficiency, give renters an incentive to conserve, so I’ll say submit on that one as well.

All right, so it’s going to keep going in that direction. It’s going to keep asking all right he got this right. It’s going to ask a harder question, a longer question, a more technical one. It’s going to get into minutia and it’s going to get into value judgments perhaps like this one, “You plan to gut renovate a bathroom. Simple white baseboard trim what should be make out of ___?” I mean you could make it out of wood, you could make it out of metal or ceramic. That’s kind of rare to have trim.

This question is particularly trying to see have you engaged with us at the crash course because we talk about this at the crash course and we recommend if you have your choice of materials, you might as well go with PVC because it won’t ever rot. Lots of landlords would install wood and make sure it’s painted and that’s an equally right answer but because I got the other one right it’s now trying to say okay what if we stretch up can we determine that this person attended the crash course. If I were to say PVC there, it would give me credit for that.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that we’re going to bomb out on the next set of questions so we can deal with what happens realistically when we don’t get a passing score, so I’ll say let’s make this trim out of ceramic. I’ve never even seen a ceramic trim and I imagine it would be terrible to work with because it would be constantly breaking but I picked that to try to get it wrong on purpose.

Now it’s asking about a three-decker. It’s asking about newer vinyl replacement windows and you got a 15-year gas boiler. “What’s the biggest bang for your buck energy improvement to make next?” It doesn’t mention insulation. Insulation is what Mass Save pays for. It’s kind of the biggest bang for the buck and they’ll give you sometimes 90 percent off.

Let’s say to get the answer wrong and keep getting them wrong let’s say well I want to replace that 15-year-old boiler, which is not really that old and let me use expensive air source heat pumps, which are wonderful but they certainly will be expensive so is that going to be biggest bang for your buck? No, that’s not the right answer here. So I’ll get that one wrong.

“What would be a desirable home heating source in Massachusetts?” Open fire; riding a stationary bike. Let’s pick something as your renter heat up your apartment by riding bike faster. I’ll just pick some wrong answers here to try to bomb out.

You’ve got a sanitary code question here. I know the right answer isn’t the wick-type space heaters for that one.

“You’ve got a stain in the apartments. What’s the what’s this likeliest cause of the leak there?” I’m going to keep picking the wrong answers here just quickly. I think it will probably take a number of questions to get through this.

We’re asking about lead poisoning again. I hope you know that kids don’t really eat mill work lead is commonly delivered to the body via dust kids crawling on the floor.

This is a long question here, so it’s trying to see hey this person was getting things right earlier and now they seem to be getting things wrong. Let me ask a hard long question again and see if maybe they can recover themselves.

Strict compliance. “What are you supposed to do with this plumbing issue?” Well I’m not a licensed plumber. I’ll say I fix it or a friend fix it that’s going to be wrong.

“Which of the following apartments is likely the least safe for child to rent, etc., etc.?”

[0:35:00]

I was hoping the test would time out by now but maybe because I got some right, it’s going to take a long time. I will abandon that but I’ll just describe visually for you how this works. If you get a lot of questions wrong and it can’t pass you, it will have a picture of a person doing a yoga pose and say let’s take a break. Then what you can do when you go back to your certification page there—

I already closed it I guess let me just go, view these test pages again. It will show me the score that I had the last time I attempted to take the test, and I’ll be able to see for instance whether I did well or not. Now the scores are pretty technical and we’re listing kind of the raw format so that people understand.

There’s a description here in the box about how scores work. Basically there are two components to it. There’s if you imagine a spectrum of ability, there’s where we think the center point of the distribution is and then there’s a probability distribution around that. That’s what the two numbers are used to describe.

For instance, we can look at the last time I did the modules for Maintain Buildings and it said my score was a minus 3.3, which is quite poor and the standard error is 0.4, which is quite small, so I use the Module Two example for where I get things wrong a lot. That says this person is a very low ability and we’re quite certain of it and so I’m not passing that, but it doesn’t lock me out. I could go retake that module right away. I could go click all these links that are available. I could search for things that I wasn’t sure of learning about lead paint and so on and I can come back here and retake that.

What I would point out is although you can retake the test right away it is generally better to give us feedback on it first because there’s a good chance you know something that our test writers didn’t or they didn’t phrase it correctly, so the question would need to be adapted or changed a little before you retake it and you’re confident in passing so we want to give you the opportunity to do that.

So you take a test and I hope you’ll pass and you’ll get the green light that says yes, you passed the Talk to Tenants module but especially with Maintain Buildings where you our expertise may be more legal compliance than plumbing there may be some things in here you want to point out as in need of correction.

When you have done all four modules and all four boxes light up green, that CML Level Two logo will be automatically applied to your profile nothing more you need to do, and you won’t need to update your marketing at all because when we showed the images, you know remember I showed the ad in the slide there it just said certified verify at. It didn’t say what level particularly, so the idea is that this supposed to be a lightweight way to get your certification and know that you’re doing the right thing and build on that over time you always learn more at continuing at events.

That’s the core concept of the material we wanted to go over and. As I mentioned, this test is live now and there’s no restriction on who can take it as long as you’re a member and you first certified as Level One, which you can do in just a few minutes online.

Questions and Answers

Let me just flip over to the questions and see.

Tracy asks, “Is there a limit to the number of times you can take the test?

No. As a matter of fact even though I already have a green light under Talk to Tenants, I could retake the Talk to Tenants module again just to learn, just for fun. Maybe the test has been adapted since I last took it and I want to learn something here so it’s going to ask me about you know advertising an apartment or so on I could do that as much as I like, same for Maintaining Buildings, which I failed. If you fail it, you could retake right away and you can do it a hundred times although like I said don’t do it a hundred times because the tests might be constantly asking you a question that you’re getting wrong because you know more than the test writers so we want to make sure that we’ve got that feedback first.

“If you got some questions correct but failed overall,” Beatrice asks, “do the questions you got right still count towards your second test?”

No. When you retake a test, it’s going to draw randomly from the 150 questions that are in the bank or 200 depending on the size, so let’s say last time you aced the lead paint section and the Maintain Building section gave you a lot of credit for that, but you had real issues with something like whether to hire a licensed plumber or something like that. Then in that case you’ll start the second test clean slate. If you get a lead question asked randomly again, it won’t know that you passed lead before but hopefully that knowledge is still, there so you’ll quickly ratchet up the scale again and then when you get the plumbing questions right as well it will cement your lead and say okay yep this person passes. But right now there’s no consistency between tests.

I will point out one thing that maybe hasn’t been asked but could be. If you want to find out which particular questions you got wrong we’re happy to go over that with you, but the site doesn’t give any automatic feedback at the moment, so we can pull a report and say you know what you got uh you got all the lead stuff right but you need to research you know when you need to hire a plumber or not. That’s something that we can tell you if you just want to give us a ring or email hello@masslanewards.net.

[0:40:28]

Altagracia asked, “When is the test ready to take?”

Thank you, Naomi, for answering that but this is live now and you can take it now. That’s different from in the past where we talked about this test was coming and we advertised it and we said it’s coming soon but it’s ready now. I think we answered your question Altagracia. I see your hand was raised as well on the attendee list, so I’m happy to end early.

I think we’ve hit our educational objectives for this webinar, but I just want to give another minute. If there are any questions please do type those in and we’ll make sure to address those here while we’re together.

Naomi, feel free to chime in as well if you feel like there’s anything that I forgot to mention or didn’t correctly present.

All right, I see Iris says, “Great webinar!”

Thank you. I appreciate that thanks.

I think what we’ll do is end there in the uh interests of having a sense of accomplishment with some extra time in our day, but if there’s any follow-up questions as particularly if you want help creating a profile certifying Level One or taking the test, you can email hello@masslandlords.net and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Allison and Charles have questions here I’ll address.

So Charles, “Will the 10 hours requirement possibly be lowered?”

Possibly it will be. We haven’t rolled out the Level Three requirement yet but I want to point out that there will be a way to test based on having read the newsletter and the newsletter will count as an hour. For instance, if you were to read 10 newsletters out of the 12 in a year that come out and test on those, you would get full credit and you wouldn’t even have to attend an event just because you’re reading, so I think the 10 hours is pretty reasonable. But if you have a specific suggestion on how to improve it, glad to hear it you can email hello@masslandlords.net.

Allison asks, “How do we call for feedback? What number?”

That’s the main number, 774-314-1896. You just got to give us some time to pull the report and then we can schedule a time to go over it with you.

Mary says, “Very impressive. A lot of work has gone into this. Thank you and your staff for all the efforts with this.”

Well you’re welcome uh and it is an awful lot of work. As I mentioned, 700 questions it takes about 15 minutes to write a question and it takes probably another 15 minutes to validate it and check it out and obviously it requires the depth of experience to know what we’re doing here, so I do feel very proud about the tests. I appreciate you recognizing the work that’s gone into it and I want to commit to making sure it’s meaningful for all of us. Certainly, Mary if you or any of your teams see any issues with it just let us know and we can get those questions corrected all right.

We’ll end there. Remember to email hello@masslandlords.net.

Thank you very much everyone for your interest and we’ll see you online and hopefully at an event this fall. Plans to be announced. Take care all and stay safe.

[End 0:44:05]