Texas Real Estate Commission hears mixed progress report on Realm licensing portal; vendor says stabilization under way

The Texas Real Estate Commission on Thursday heard a lengthy briefing on its new Realm license-management portal as staff and vendor representatives described both progress and persistent problems following a rocky December rollout.

Executive Director Chelsea Buckles said the agency has issued more than 10,000 licenses and 9,000 exam authorizations since the rollout, and agency teams have closed nearly 100 critical tickets. Still, she acknowledged deep customer-service strains: the commission’s March average hold time exceeded 50 minutes and thousands of callers and email inquiries overwhelmed staff.

“Three months ago our pain points were many — mostly manual, slow processing and unprecedented call and email volumes,” Buckles said. “We’ve made meaningful progress, but we’re not finished.”

Asella/Excel, the portal vendor, told commissioners the implementation has moved into a stabilization phase. Jonathan Ward, vice president of government strategy at Excel, said Texas’s implementation was unusually large and complex and that teams had reduced open high-priority tickets from about 104 to roughly four.

“Our commitment is to continuous improvement and to deliver an experience that is more efficient and intuitive,” Ward said.

The commission and vendor detailed how the system now handles common transactions. Staff said sponsorship updates often propagate within hours, many document uploads are immediate, and exam authorizations and license issuance commonly complete within 24–48 hours once back-end checks finish. Asella said some batch processes still run periodically, accounting for occasional delays.

But several commissioners pressed the vendor and agency on unresolved issues: long, variable hold times; inconsistent data conversion results that left some records incorrect or out of date; and the need to preserve adequate security and access controls for sensitive license-holder data. Asella said its team performs regular regression testing and quarterly updates and certified that cloud security scans and vulnerability testing are part of its operations.

Agency managers described a multi-pronged response: expanded self‑service materials (how‑to videos and a new “Realm help” tab on the TRE website), targeted webinars for brokers and applicants, temporary staffing increases, a form for people who remain stuck, and closer coordination with Asella to bring the portal into the maintenance phase.

Customer-relations director Robert Hood said the contact center has begun to see improvement: April had multiple days with average hold times under 20 minutes, though the agency remains far from its two‑minute goal.

“The contact center has experienced turnover and heavy volume,” Hood said. “As applicants and license holders become more familiar with the portal, we expect hold times to decline as callers self‑serve.”

The commission asked Asella to provide more detail on the vendor’s long-term support model, timelines for remaining back-office deployments and verification procedures for security and administrative access; Asella said it aims to complete the remaining deliverables in the coming months and move fully to the vendor-supported maintenance phase.

What’s next: the commission and staff will continue weekly engagement with the vendor, broaden outreach and training for license holders, and prioritize fixes that reduce call volume and correct data-conversion errors. Staff encouraged license holders still experiencing problems to use the portal’s help resources or the agency’s online assistance form so staff can triage the remaining outliers.