Call me crazy, but as an amateur historian I hold the conviction that you can understand the present, and perhaps even anticipate the future, by learning about the past.  I like to think that that is true not just about people, but also about places, and even institutions like NorCal CCIM.

I am a big fan of Henry Lewis Gates Jr. and his television series Knowing Your Roots. In a recent episode I was struck by a quote from guest Steth Meyers, the comedian who has a late night show after getting his start on Saturday Night Live. Here is what he said after learning about his ancestors:

This gives you an appreciation for people who in the present understand that the future will want to know about the past.  I feel like we live in a time where people are only focused on the present and they are not thinking about what the future is gonna need.

There is little documentation about the early years of the chapter’s history, but it doesn’t take much imagination to speculate on how things happened.  Since about 1954, Jay Levine, Jim McMichael, Victor “Rick” Lyon and Palmer Burge had been traveling through California teaching their CRE courses.  Levine was actually from the Bay Area so he had both the incentive and the connections to pull off successful courses. Plus, he had the backing of the California Associations of Realtors which, in addition to sanctioning the course curriculum, also awarded, at Levine’s urging, a designation of Certified Property Exchangers (CPE) to successful students. 

When, in 1967, Levine succeeded in convincing NAR to officially embrace the commercial brokerage community by adopting the CPE designation, the course of history was set. While CCIM was not awarded “official” institute status until 1991, it operated under NAR’s Realtors Marketing Institute (RMI) for several years. It was initially called the Investment Property  Exchange and Taxation group, after the name of its classes.  Later it became the National Institute of Real Estate Brokers (NIREB) and  Levine was its first president.

So it is not a quantum leap to imagine how a group of Levine’s students thought it was time to create a local entity to network, promote the CPE designation, market exchanges, and elevate their status as designated practitioners in the art of commercial real estate brokerage.

In 1971, several of Levine’s students set off to form the first chapter of NIREB. It took several months to negotiate the terms of the first chapter, but it was finally signed on January 24, 1972. There  were 28 charter members and the jurisdiction ranged from Tulare County, north to the Oregon state line.  Their mission was simple:  to educate designees and candidates and to assist candidates in earing the designation.

Of those first chapter members, seven were women, making the demographic unusually diverse given the times.  Six charter members went on to become chapter presidents. Interestingly, despite his Bay Area roots, Jay Levine was not a charter member of the chapter.

By Terry Shores
April, 2024