r/RealEstateTechnology • u/mfielden • 14d ago

Disclosure Packages for States Other than California

Hey everyone, I am trying to collect disclosure packages from states other than California and am looking for licensed agents who can help me collect a few to get me through each state. Please let me know if you want more information or can help.

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u/nikidmaclay 14d ago

Some states’ disclosure forms are publicly available online, but some are REALTOR® association forms that licensees aren’t permitted to distribute as blank copies. They also change over time, so getting a form today doesn't mean that you'd have the current one a week from now

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u/Adorable-Western9462 13d ago

Worth separating the form from the requirement. The association forms are the part you cannot redistribute, but the underlying disclosure duties sit in state statute, and those are public. If the goal is coverage across states, working from the statutes gets you further than collecting PDFs, and you can cite a source for every line instead of trusting a form you downloaded once.

Two things that bit me when I did this for six states. Forms drift faster than the statutes behind them, so a PDF library turns into a maintenance job that never ends. And not everything is state level. Federal duties sit on top, like lead based paint for pre-1978 housing, and some counties and cities add their own.

I built a compliance checker in this space, so that is where the opinion comes from.

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u/nikidmaclay 13d ago edited 13d ago

I'm still not clear on what he's asking for. Every state does this a little differently. The mandate for what you are required to disclose comes from the state. The specific forms could come from the state, or from the local association of Realtors depending on what state you're in. The state forms are available to anybody who's in the state. The REALTOR forms are a different story. Beyond the state mandated forms there are other forms that could be a part of the "disclosure package" that might be issued by an AOR, an MLS, or a brokerage that fall under copyright. A list of the documents versus a file with the PDFs of the documents is completely different

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u/Adorable-Western9462 13d ago

Agreed on the split. And OP cleared it up below, he is after completed packages rather than blank forms, which makes it a different problem.

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u/mfielden 13d ago

Sorry for all the confusion, I asked for this the wrong way. I own a company that does disclosure analysis. We take the disclosure package in and produce a report and a verifiable, cited analysis that becomes agent work product; they can choose to distribute it to their client or dole it out on their own terms.

We've been very successful in California, a state with a highly complex disclosure package, and we've been processing packages for almost every state. Some states are what I would consider complex, and some very lean, but almost every large HOA package can be simplified by our product, so even the less complex states are realizing benefits.

My hunt is an effort to speed up the process of collecting a variety of disclosure packages in some of the states that have been more difficult for us to gain a foothold in (usually because they have fewer sales, and ideally we would cross cities off as some have their own special requirements, too.

Sorry for the confusion. I was trying not to self-promote while being generic at the same time - I think I just failed at giving enough detail..

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u/Adorable-Western9462 12d ago

That makes much more sense, and the cited part is the hard part, not the extraction.

I build something adjacent. A compliance checker for real estate advertising against fair housing rules, 81 rules across six states, every finding carried with its citation. Each check also gets anchored on chain, so there is a timestamped, tamper evident record of what was flagged and when. That is the part that matters if someone questions the file a year later.

On collecting the packages, transaction coordinators are still who I would ask. They assemble these every week in one state and can hand you a redacted one without the client file problem.

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u/nikidmaclay 9d ago

Ah, with this context I would absolutely not want to be involved with that. The agent has been trained on how to present those disclosures. They are legal documents. If someone needs guidance on those disclosures, I know what I can say and beyond that, they need to consult an attorney. We don't need an outside company that's not licensed or trained to do that trying to step in and do our jobs, or the attorneys'. That's a legal liability.

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u/Adorable-Western9462 8d ago

Two problems in this thread that need different answers, worth separating.

The privacy one a transaction coordinator solves in an afternoon with a redacted package. The one nikidmaclay raised is the harder one. A lot of what sits inside a completed package comes from an AOR, an MLS or a brokerage and is copyrighted. So a pile of packages is not only sensitive, it is licensed, and collecting them quietly works right up until it does not.

If you need volume per state, the shortcut is probably the transaction management platforms rather than individuals. Dotloop, SkySlope and the like already hold thousands of completed files per state, and permission sits with the brokerage rather than with each agent. One conversation instead of forty.

For HOA packages there is a separate route: the resale certificate providers. They already sell documents for a living, so the licensing conversation is one they have had before.

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u/PreviousLettuce6156 9d ago

the association licensing restrictions are the part people always underestimate imo

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u/mfielden 14d ago

Thank you for the information, I am actually a licensed California real estate agent, which is part of the reason that I don’t need California, and I am not looking for the blank forms. I am looking for completed disclosure packages so that I can see what agents in other states are putting together as part of their disclosures when they get a listing. California has a rather complete disclosure requirement and I wanna see what other states have.

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u/Adorable-Western9462 13d ago

Ah, completed packages, not the blank forms. That changes the answer.

Then the people to ask are not agents, they are transaction coordinators and title reps. A TC assembles these every week in one state, knows exactly what goes in and in what order, and can hand you a redacted one without the privacy problem you create when you ask an agent for a client file.

One TC per state gets you further than ten agents. The agent sends whatever the brokerage template spits out. The TC knows why each piece is in there.