The Alabama Real Estate Commission has spent the past three legislative sessions expanding what it can do, using laws it wrote itself, carried by members it recruited, on a schedule that keeps it out of daylight again until 2028.

In 2024, the Alabama Legislature continued the commission under the Sunset Law for four years rather than the one- or two-year term applied to state boards. In 2025, AREC drafted HB225 and found two House members to introduce it: State Rep. Rolanda Hollis (D-Birmingham) and former State Rep. Debbie Wood (R-Valley), who had owned a licensed brokerage since 2000.

The bill passed both chambers without a dissenting vote.

In 2026, the commission returned behind HB586, which would extend its licensing authority over real estate wholesalers, a category of operator AREC has never regulated.

In December 2025, seven months after HB225 was signed, AREC hired Wood into its Legal Division as an administrative assistant to the audit team.

The commission’s January meeting minutes record her hire. The audit team reviews the files of licensed real estate offices across the state.

Alabama law does not prohibit any part of that. There is no cooling-off period between legislative service and employment at a state agency. There is no requirement that a legislator disclose holding a license from the agency whose bill she is carrying.

There is no limit on how often an agency may write its own statute. The Legislature has never taken up any of the three, and the committee record on HB225 contains no discussion of any of them.

HB225 did not come from a member. The Alabama Realtors Association, which represents more than 18,000 licensees across 23 local boards, described it in April 2025 as filed by Hollis and Wood “and sponsored by AREC.”

The enrolled act raises the coursework required for a salesperson’s license, separates pre-license schools from continuing-education schools in statute, creates an approval process for pre-license instructors, establishes inactive status for instructors and schools, builds a commission approval process for distance education, and imposes accountability measures on pre-license schools whose students fail the licensing exam. It doubles the maximum fine AREC may levy against schools, administrators and instructors, from $2,500 to $5,000.

AREC’s own statutory changes page lists the effective date as Oct. 1, 2028.

The association did not fight it. Its session recap describes a compromise reached among the association, the sponsors and the commission, after which AAR’s government affairs staff worked to pass the bill. State Sen. Josh Carnley (R-Enterprise) carried it in the Senate, where it also passed unanimously.

Two other real estate bills moved the same session. HB382, State Rep. Jamie Kiel’s bill and the association’s own priority, raised the general maximum fine for licensee violations from $2,500 to $5,000, defined real estate teams and capped out-of-state co-brokerage arrangements. It took effect Oct. 1, 2025 as Act 2025-380. HB230 became Act 2025-59 in April. Between the three, the ceiling on what AREC can collect from a licensee doubled in a single session.

Wood has been broker and owner of Century 21 Wood Real Estate in Valley since 2000, according to her public biography. She served 16 years on the Chambers County Commission, becoming its first female chairwoman, and was sworn into the House in November 2018.

She was a member of the industry AREC regulates at the time she put her name on AREC’s bill.

Wood announced on June 2, 2025, at a Chambers County Commission meeting, that she would leave the House at the end of July. Her husband had taken a job in the Florida panhandle, the couple was relocating, and Alabama law requires legislators to live in the districts they represent.

She resigned effective July 31.

Wood’s husband took a job in Pensacola in January 2025, two months before the session that produced HB225. She announced her departure on June 2 and left the House July 31, citing the relocation and the residency requirement for legislators. She acknowledged she could have served out the term.

“I own property in Chambers County, so I could have completed my term, but my heart and body would have been somewhere else,” she said at that time.

When Executive Director Dr. Vaughn T. Poe introduced Wood to commissioners, he also reported that AREC was working to fill other Legal Division vacancies. Assistant Attorney General Serena Cronier Grayson and Legal Assistant Angie Kidd had both left for positions at other state agencies.

The division lost two legal professionals and added a former legislator.

AREC’s regulated community has objected to how the commission operates. In a formal comment filed in July 2025, the Alabama Realtors Association wrote that a proposed AREC rule appeared to have been decided before the public comment period closed, noting that the commission’s education department distributed advisory materials on June 5 describing the rule as already in the approval process while comments were still being accepted through July 4.

The association asked AREC and its staff to stop issuing guidance before rules were final, writing that doing so undermines the public comment process.

That objection came from the largest trade association the commission regulates.

Alabama’s revolving-door provision, Ala. Code § 36-25-13, bars a former public official from serving for a fee as a lobbyist before the body of which he or she was a member for two years.

It is aimed at former legislators who return to the State House. It says nothing about taking a staff job at a state agency, and nothing in the public record indicates Wood has lobbied anyone.

The Act’s personal-gain provisions would require evidence that employment was offered, discussed or arranged before or during consideration of the bill. No such evidence is public.

Separately, § 36-25-1(b)(8) exempts an agency head or the agency head’s designee from lobbyist registration when communicating policy on the agency’s behalf, and Ethics Commission guidance requires agencies to file a letter each January identifying those individuals.

Whether AREC has ever filed one naming Wood is not public.

The Sunset Law is the Legislature’s standing checkpoint on AREC, the one proceeding at which a committee would be obliged to ask how the commission staffs itself, how it selects audits and how it drafts its bills.

That review returns in 2028, the same year HB225 takes effect.