Passed the California RE exam with one month cram/first-time
Got laid off from my tech job so decided to give RE a try. I ended up being the first person to finish the exam this morning in Oakland, and the guy at the front desk with the glasses let me know I passed when I walked out. The reason I made this post is because I was a little intimidated by all the different resources given by this sub (as well as accusations of fake shilling from different companies) so figured I would give my two cents — you can also take a look at my account history to verify I’m a real person, which I felt a lot of the other similar posts on this sub lacked.
I started cramming for the test in early June, and just did about an hour or two every day outside of the mandatory coursework. Did CE Shop for my courses because they were cheap and were on sale — found it ok for understanding concepts but terrible for exam prep. I also tried the one week Aceable/Prepagent subscription but I feel like it’s shallow and doesn’t go deep enough into core concepts — the “cheat sheet” they offered was pretty useless as it goes over the general principles but not dates or other things that you probably will need to know on the exam. It’s also extremely overpriced for what it offers. Real Estate Exam Practice Pro was wayyyy cheaper at $10 a month and the questions I saw there were pretty similar to the exam, if not a little harder. Instead of memorizing answers I made sure to read the description of why I was right or wrong when I took the test, which helped me understand key concepts at a much deeper level compared to the other two exam prep resources. If you search up FirstTuesday they also have some free practice exams up but YMMV, a few questions were outdated such as how much rent you can use as security deposit for unfurnished apartments, which is 1 month as of July 2024. Honestly if you just grind REEPP for like two weeks you should be fine with that alone, I was averaging about 87% on the tests and felt pretty confident going into the actual exam. I watched the PrepAgent webinar with Irene driving up to Oakland and it was laughably easy compared to the stuff I was memorizing.
The exam covered some topics I wasn’t familiar with but I was able to guess a few (I.e. what is the saving of resources called - conservation?) or when disclosing a AIDs death is permitted (I was under the impression never). I was however able to use some questions to answer others, like what makes up net operating income since there were two questions about its makeup. I ended up finishing my first pass of the exam in about 40 minutes, did a second pass to double check answers, and then a third pass to guess questions I wasn’t sure about (roughly 10 or so), finishing in roughly about an hour and ten minutes. There was no calculator provided and the only math was a question that involved multiplying 20 with 3000. I found the test much easier than I was expecting, mostly because I’d already seen a lot of the questions before or similar ones on practice exams — bingeing vocab can only be so efficient, as often the point of the question is trick wording to get you to stumble on that.
Good luck to everyone else taking the exam!