The CE Shop Review (2026): What the Only Regulator Data Shows, and Who It Is Wrong For

One government agency measures The CE Shop by name. The Colorado Division of Real Estate publishes first time broker exam pass rates school by school, with the raw numerator and denominator, split into a national component and a Colorado state law component. Across the three most recent published periods The CE Shop beat the Colorado statewide average on the national half every time, and fell below it on the state law half every time. That split, across 828 first attempts, is the most useful thing anyone can currently tell you about this school.

There is no price in this review. The CE Shop's own website returns HTTP 405 to automated requests, and that block covers its pricing pages, its legal and terms page, its pass guarantee page and its pass rate claims. The honest response is to report that absence rather than fill it in from a commission paid directory.

I am Saad Jamil. Licensed since 2007, still selling today at Samson Properties in Chantilly, Virginia, with more than $500M and over 800 homes closed. I have never taken a CE Shop course and will not pretend otherwise. I run real estate coaching for new agents, which competes for the same dollar this school upsells you on. And the disclosure that matters most: Jamil Academy carries an affiliate link to The CE Shop and earns a commission when a reader enrols there. I get paid if you buy the product this article is about. That is exactly why the only performance figure here comes from a state regulator rather than the company or anyone else paid on the outcome.

Colorado is the only place a regulator counts this school

Colorado publishes a file almost no other state does. Each quarter, plus an annual summary, the Division of Real Estate lists approved providers by name with how many of their students sat the broker exam for the first time and how many passed, split into national and state law components.

That structure is what makes it usable: school name, numerator, denominator and statewide benchmark in one document published by the body that approves the school. Here are the three most recent periods as at 21 August 2026. Q3 2026, Q4 2026 and the 2026 annual are listed as coming soon.

Volume first, because a pattern on twelve candidates would mean nothing. In Q2 2026 The CE Shop supplied 102 of the state's 770 first time national component testers, 13.2 percent, and 101 of 779 state component testers, 13.0 percent. Roughly one in eight Colorado broker candidates.

Add the three periods. National: 379 of 513 first attempts passed, 73.9 percent, against 2,746 of 4,356 statewide, 63.0 percent. State law: 150 of 315 passed, 47.6 percent, against 1,589 of 3,090 statewide, 51.4 percent. Same school, same students, same day at the test centre.

What the split plausibly means, and what it cannot mean

The national component is uniform material: agency, contracts, financing, valuation, fair housing, vocabulary. It is the same in Denver as in Richmond, so a national provider builds it once and refines it on tens of thousands of students. The state component is Colorado statute, Commission rules and Colorado forms, written and maintained separately for every jurisdiction. One plausible reading of the file is exactly that: a strong national core with a thinner Colorado law module on top.

There is a second reading and it belongs here. Pass rates attributed to a school also reflect who enrols there, and a cheap, nationally advertised school draws a different candidate mix from a small Denver academy. Nothing in this file separates course quality from student mix.

What survives either reading is the part that affects you. If you are a Colorado broker candidate, the recorded outcome for students attributed to this school is below the state average on the Colorado half of your exam, in every published period. Now the limits. One state out of fifty, broker candidates only, first attempts rather than eventual licensure, and candidates attributed to a single school even though many buy a course from one provider and exam prep from another. Turning this into a national verdict would be overreaching.

The rule this site set, and the one number that clears it

The roundup published here yesterday set the standard for this category: throw out any pass rate that does not arrive with a regulator behind it, a numerator and a denominator. It declined to rank eight schools because almost nothing met the test. The reasoning is in the comparison of the eight most reviewed online real estate schools.

Applying that rule honestly means applying it when the answer is inconvenient. Marketing pass rates are self reported, survey based rates measure who answered the survey, and affiliate directory rates cite a regulator in prose and no file you can open.

Colorado clears all three tests at once, and it happens to be unflattering on the state half for the one school this website earns money from. That is the test working, not failing.

Set against it, here is the company on itself. In a press release dated 10 January 2022 the chief executive Gary Weiss said: "Our 96% student satisfaction rating and industry-leading pass rate are testimony to the educational excellence we provide." No pass rate appears in the Washington catalogue the school files as an approved provider, revision dated 01/01/2026.

Texas publishes the right thing and it could not be read

Texas should have been the second data point and it is the biggest unresolved gap here. The Texas Real Estate Commission runs a page titled Provider Exam Passage Rates for Sales Agents and Brokers, publishing per provider an overall pass rate, a sales agent rate, a broker rate, exam counts, exams passed, and a status of In Good Standing, Subject to Probation, or Subject to Disapproval or Revocation.

The methodology page is worth quoting, because it describes supervision rather than marketing. TREC states that "The benchmark, or Minimum Pass Rate (MPR), is calculated monthly," and that "Minimum Pass Rate (MPR) is equal to 80% of the Overall Pass Rate. To remain in good standing, each provider's Overall Pass Rate must meet or exceed the Minimum Pass Rate (MPR)."

Consequences attach. A provider between 50 and 79.9 percent of the overall rate "will be placed on probation when they file an application for reapproval," reviewed annually. One "whose Overall Pass Rate is below 50%... may be disapproved when filing an application for reapproval." TREC cites Rule 535.65(c)(1)(C).

The table itself defeated every permitted method. It renders client side, so fetching the page returns Angular template placeholders instead of provider rows. The non www host returned only the template, and the JSON variant, the rates endpoint and the inspector version were refused at the robots layer.

The only Texas figures in circulation come from a school directory that says on its own pages that it may earn a commission when a reader buys through its links, and that cites no file, endpoint or date stamp. They are not repeated here, in a table or in a sentence, and I would say the same if they flattered the school.

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Why there is no price in this review

This changes what any reader can expect from a review of this school, so it goes in plain words. The CE Shop blocks automated access to its own website. Requests to theceshop.com return HTTP 405, and the block sits in front of the pages a buyer most needs.

During research on 21 August 2026 these all returned HTTP 405: the legal and terms page, the pass guarantee page, the exam prep product page, the state pricing pages, and the pass guarantee affidavit PDF. The effect is that no third party can retrieve, quote or archive this company's prices, guarantee wording or pass rate claims from the source.

So there is no price in this article. Not a range, not a starting from, not a figure lifted off a comparison table. One marketing page did resolve and carries a price range for an add on product, and even that is not repeated, because it sits on the domain that blocks verification of everything around it.

That absence is a finding, not a hole. Every price attached to this school on a comparison page was transcribed by a human from one checkout on one day, or copied from a site that did, and nobody can audit it afterwards because the source page will not answer. For the arithmetic on getting started, what it actually costs to become a Realtor lays out the full bill.

An A plus grade and a one star average, same page

The Better Business Bureau profile is filed under The CE Shop, LLC, real estate school category, at 5670 Greenwood Plaza Blvd Ste 340, Greenwood Village, Colorado, with The CE Shop, Inc. as an alternate name. The rating is A+ and it has been BBB Accredited since 5/10/2022.

On the same profile, BBB's own customer reviews average 1 out of 5 stars across 16 reviews. The star distribution is not displayed and only 1 star reviews were visible when the page was checked on 21 August 2026.

BBB explains the contradiction itself, in a line printed on the profile: "Customer Reviews are not used in the calculation of the BBB Letter Grade Rating."

Read them as two instruments. The A+ largely reflects whether a business answers complaints, resolves them and stays accredited. The 1 out of 5 reflects what 16 self selected people chose to write, and almost nobody writes an unprompted review of a course that went fine. Neither is a sample you can generalise from.

One oddity while we are here. BBB records the business as started 6/1/2009, while the parent company's history page says its history "dates back to 2005, when we founded our flagship real estate education brand, The CE Shop." Neither has been reconciled against a Secretary of State filing.

76 complaints in three years, and what they are about

Complaint volume is the part of the profile that carries information, because complaints are categorised and dated. The profile records 76 complaints closed in the last three years and 26 in the last twelve months.

Service or Repair plus Product is 56 of the 76. That is the signal. These are not billing disputes and not, in the main, complaints about the teaching. They are complaints about the platform and about access to a course already paid for. Three dated examples with the company's responses.

06/12/2026, Product Issues, resolved. A student who had bought a 168 hour Colorado broker pre-licensing package asked to transfer the enrolment to the Illinois 75 hour equivalent, and the company confirmed a resolution. The complaint names a dollar amount the customer says they paid; it is not repeated, because one account of one transaction is not a published price.

06/11/2026, Product Issues, answered. A refund was sought on a course less than 10 percent complete after pregnancy complications. Policy normally denies refunds outside 30 days. The company recorded that it made "a one-time exception and issued a full refund to your original form of payment."

05/16/2026, Service or Repair, resolved. The student wrote: "I completed the training and took the final exam on 5/5/2026. As I wanted to submit the exam, their system logged me out." The company confirmed completion once IT resolved it. A 05/13/2026 complaint records a student unable to open courses with due dates attached and unable to reach support; a refund was approved once contact was made.

Read together, the shape is consistent both ways. The platform fails, support is hard to reach at that moment, and the company frequently does fix it once a human is reached. That is a technical and staffing problem rather than bad faith.

The reviews point at the same machinery. Misty K, 04/22/2026: "Their site keeps crashing. No one can open their courses. Tech Support isn't answering." Elizabeth B, 02/18/2025: "I discovered that the courses had expired! I received no correspondence from the company." Victoria M, 06/18/2025: "They advertise a 12-day window to complete the course, but in reality, you have about 10 days."

The 4.8 that is not a counterweight

The obvious move here is a big friendly rating to balance BBB. One is available: reviews.io shows The CE Shop at 4.8 out of 5 from 3,957 reviews with a 97 percent recommendation rate, checked 21 August 2026. Printing it without saying what kind of sample it is would be dishonest.

reviews.io is a merchant integrated platform. The retailer connects it to its own systems and the platform invites reviews from the retailer's own customer list, at a moment the retailer chooses. Only the aggregate is published, not the distribution.

So 4.8 from 3,957 against 1.0 from 16 is not a comparison at all. One is a large solicited sample gathered by the seller from customers it chose to ask; the other is a small self initiated sample of people angry enough to find a complaint form.

What is worth taking from a corpus that size is the themes, which are stable across a big sample. Praise clusters in four places: flexibility and self pacing, affordability, a straightforward interface, and reaching a human on the phone.

Complaints inside the same corpus cluster in four places too: platform glitches and lost progress, support unreachable when the platform fails, unclear progression with exam requirements that were not obvious, and expiry followed by paid extensions. One verified reviewer: "lack of clear information feels like a deliberate push to sell extensions."

One platform is missing and its absence should be visible. Trustpilot could not be read. Three separate hosts returned HTTP 403 on 21 August 2026, so no Trustpilot score, review total or star distribution appears here. Our schools roundup captured one before the block appeared; it is not restated here because it could not be re-verified today.

The one consumer finding that survives scrutiny

Those two categories are 56 of the 76 BBB complaints. Not a scattering of unrelated grievances, but two mechanisms producing most of the friction. The finding survives because two platforms that collect reviews in opposite ways agree.

The direction of the agreement is what makes it strong. reviews.io reviews are solicited by the seller from its own customers, so a complaint surviving into that corpus runs against the collection method's own bias. That makes it a fact about the product rather than about the sampling.

The terms, from a document filed with a state

The legal page sits behind the same HTTP 405 block, so these terms came in by another door: Washington requires an approved provider to publish a school catalogue. The CE Shop LLC Catalog for Washington State, revision dated 01/01/2026, is hosted on Contentful's content delivery network rather than on the company's own domain, and it opened without difficulty. It is a disclosure document produced for a state regulator, not a marketing page, printed under the entity name The CE Shop LLC.

The shortest window sits on the managing broker product, bought by people already working full time. Note the drafting gap: the course expires at six months and the per month extension pricing is described as applying after seven. That is how the catalogue reads, quoted rather than smoothed.

The refund policy is the part worth reading twice. For distance courses the catalogue says the company will "refund the purchase price of any course if the refund request is submitted within thirty (30) days of purchase, prior to course expiration, and the course is not more than fifty percent (50%) complete." For live courses: "Refunds are only available if requested within 30 days of purchase. Refunds will only be issued if the course is not more than 50% complete."

The catalogue also documents an inactivity timer: "After 20 minutes of inactivity, the timer will stop and a pop up window appears asking the student if they wish to continue or not." That stacking of refund conditions is the machinery behind the Product Issues complaints at BBB and the extensions theme at reviews.io. The same logic covers post-license course requirements and deadlines, which your state sets and which rarely match a vendor's clock.

Two caveats. No pass rate appears in this state catalogue, notable for a company whose press releases describe an industry leading one. And these are the Washington terms. Equivalent catalogues exist for Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, Ohio, Oregon and Colorado, but those copies sit on theceshop.com and were not fetched.

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Access and deadline calculator

The expiry clock is the most predictable way students get hurt here, and it is arithmetic rather than bad luck. Working full time, the hours a week you will really study is usually half the number you first type. If you are unsure what your state demands, the timeline for real estate school by state covers the requirement side.

One of nine brands, and several of them are the alternatives

The CE Shop is not a standalone school. It is one of nine brands inside Career Certified, a portfolio company of the private equity firm Waud Capital Partners, which announced a recapitalisation on 22 December 2020. Terms were not disclosed. Co-founders Ken Horner Jr. and Michael McAllister kept leadership roles and remained "meaningful shareholders in the recapitalized company."

Two weeks later, on 5 January 2021, S&P Global Market Intelligence headlined the same deal differently: "The CE Shop receives $110M loan backing LBO by Waud Capital." The sponsor called it a growth capital partnership; the leveraged finance press called it a buyout backed by $110 million of debt.

On 10 January 2022 the company, "backed by Waud Capital Partners," acquired Mbition Real Estate, described then as serving more than 600,000 users, American Home Inspectors Training and Stringham Schools. Terms were not disclosed, and by then the chief executive was Gary Weiss, not co-founder Ken Horner Jr.

Here is why a buyer should care. Mbition, Stringham Schools and AHIT were established, separately branded competitors before they were bought. Any comparison page listing them as alternatives to The CE Shop is comparing a company to itself, documented by the acquirer's own history page and by trade press.

One footnote worth keeping. Mbition no longer appears on the current brand list at all, despite the 600,000 user figure quoted when it was acquired.

What could not be established at all

This section needs reading exactly as written. Nothing adverse was found in litigation or enforcement. That is not a clean record. It is an unsearched one, because the databases that would settle it refused access.

• Litigation. The CourtListener docket search was blocked by robots rules and general searches returned nothing relevant. No lawsuit was identified, and the search that would have settled it could not be run.
• Regulator discipline. No disciplinary action, consent order, approval revocation or suspension was found anywhere, across domain restricted searches of roughly fifteen state government domains. Most licensing enforcement databases are form gated and were not machine searchable, so absence of evidence is weak evidence here.
• Attorney general action. No state action, assurance of discontinuance or published complaint dataset naming this company was found.
• North Carolina. NCREC publishes exactly the format Colorado does. Three URLs returned HTTP 403 and a fourth was refused at the robots layer. No figure was obtained.
• Corporate records. The Colorado Secretary of State entity search returned HTTP 404 and is form driven, so no entity number or formation date was obtained. A Missouri CEU record was refused over an SSL failure and a Michigan course list returned 404.
• Virginia's current CE list. Retrieval was truncated before the alphabetical T section, so the school's absence from it means nothing.

The one adverse regulator record found anywhere is small. Virginia Real Estate Board Education Committee minutes for 16 September 2020 record two continuing education applications from The CE Shop, Inc. approved, one cut from six hours to three because the committee held there was insufficient material for the requested duration. Routine, not discipline, and the only time a board is on record pushing back on this company's content.

One practical note for anyone searching records. Two entity names are in concurrent official use, The CE Shop, LLC and The CE Shop, Inc., and the Greenwood Village address is printed as Suite 340, Suite 340W and Suite 420 across official lists.

The exam prep add on, and the affidavit

The company sells a separate exam prep product, Exam Prep Edge. From pages that did resolve: it launched by press release dated 14 May 2019, described as "an online interactive study tool covering all the topics featured in each state's Candidate Handbook and licensing exam."

What could not be verified: the size of the practice question bank, since unlimited practice exams is a claim about attempts rather than questions, and whether it includes video, flashcards or live instruction.

The guarantee is the interesting part. Both the pass guarantee page and a PDF whose file name is TheCEShop-ExamPrepEdgePassGuarantee-Affidavit.pdf returned HTTP 405. The file name alone tells you the guarantee is claimed by sworn affidavit rather than by a click. Its contents are unread, so nothing is paraphrased here, and the wording currently circulating comes from a publisher with a promotion agreement with this school, so it is not repeated either.

If reading a guarantee before you buy matters, that is a real reason to look elsewhere. The review of AceableAgent covers a competitor whose guarantee pages did open.

Who The CE Shop is wrong for

The title promises this section, so it is built only from the evidence above.

The Colorado candidate who is weak on state law

The state law component is below the statewide average in all three published periods, 150 of 315 across them. If general principles come easily and statute does not, that is the half of the exam where this school's record is worst.

Anyone whose next six months are unpredictable

Managing broker access is six months, pre-licensing and continuing education twelve, and the catalogue offers no free extension. A job change or a busy listing season is the difference between finishing and paying 50 percent of retail again.

The buyer who might want a refund after week five

Thirty days, before expiry, under fifty percent complete, all three at once. Wait a month to start and the refund is gone without touching the course. Sprint through half of it in three weeks and it is gone too.

The student who needs help at the moment the platform fails

Service or Repair is 32 of 76 complaints, and the same theme is the most repeated complaint inside a corpus the company solicited itself. The record shows people locked out mid exam and unable to reach support that day.

The buyer who has to see terms before committing

The pricing pages, the legal page and the guarantee page all return HTTP 405 to anyone checking from outside. You can see a price in your own browser, but you cannot compare it against an archived version and neither can any reviewer.

The shopper comparing it against its own siblings

Mbition, Stringham Schools and AHIT sit in the same corporate group, so a shortlist containing several of them is one company wearing four badges. That is a reason to redo the shortlist, not to avoid The CE Shop.

For balance, because the evidence cuts both ways. The national component result is strong and consistent, problems do get fixed once a human is reached, and thousands of solicited reviewers describe a straightforward, affordable, self paced course. The course is the cheap part and the licence is not the job. What decides your first year is the real estate coaching and business system you put around it.

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Frequently asked questions

Is The CE Shop legit?

It is a real, regulator approved school, named on Georgia's approved schools list dated 8/21/2026, on New York's approved school lists, and as a provider with attributed candidates in Colorado's official pass rate reports. It is BBB Accredited with an A+ rating. Legitimacy is not the open question. Whether it suits you is.

Does The CE Shop publish a pass rate?

Its parent used the phrase industry leading pass rate in a press release dated 10 January 2022, but no pass rate appears in the Washington state catalogue the school files as an approved provider, revision dated 01/01/2026. Its own pass rate pages return HTTP 405 to automated requests. Colorado is the only source with a regulator behind it.

What does the Colorado data show about The CE Shop?

Across calendar year 2025, Q1 2026 and Q2 2026 it beat the Colorado statewide first time average on the national component of the broker exam every time and fell below it on the state law component every time. Summed, that is 379 of 513 passed nationally, 73.9 percent against 63.0 percent statewide, and 150 of 315 on state law, 47.6 percent against 51.4 percent.

How much does The CE Shop cost?

This review quotes no price, deliberately. The company's pricing pages return HTTP 405 to automated requests, so nothing could be retrieved or archived from the source. Almost every price you see for this school elsewhere sits beside a commission link, and this site carries one too. Open the enrolment page for your own state and read the total there.

How long do you have to finish a CE Shop course?

The Washington state catalogue, revision dated 01/01/2026, says continuing education must be completed within 12 months from the time of purchase, broker pre-licensing courses expire one year after the date of purchase, and managing broker pre-licensing courses expire 6 months after the date of purchase. Those are the Washington windows.

Can you get a refund from The CE Shop?

Only if three conditions are true at once. The Washington catalogue says a distance course is refunded if the request is submitted within thirty days of purchase, prior to course expiration, and the course is not more than fifty percent complete. Fail any one and the refund is gone.

Who owns The CE Shop?

It is one of nine brands under Career Certified, a portfolio company of the private equity firm Waud Capital Partners, which announced a recapitalisation on 22 December 2020. Sibling brands include Mbition, Stringham Schools and AHIT, all bought in early 2022, so several listed alternatives belong to the same group.

Why does BBB rate it A+ when BBB reviewers give it 1 star?

Because they measure different things, and BBB says so on the profile: Customer Reviews are not used in the calculation of the BBB Letter Grade Rating. The grade reflects complaint handling and accreditation. The 1 out of 5 average across 16 reviews reflects what 16 self selected people chose to write.

Has The CE Shop been sued or disciplined by a regulator?

Nothing was found, and that is not the same as nothing existing. The docket search that would settle the litigation question was blocked by robots rules, and most state licensing enforcement databases are form gated. The only adverse regulator record located is a Virginia board decision of 16 September 2020 that cut a course from six hours to three.

Every figure, quotation and date here was captured from the named source on 21 August 2026 and is subject to change. No price is quoted because theceshop.com returns HTTP 405 to automated requests, and no figure from an affiliate publisher appears anywhere in this article. Jamil Academy carries an affiliate link to The CE Shop and may earn a commission if a reader enrols. This is independent commentary, is not endorsed by any school named, and is educational content only. Confirm approval status, pricing, expiry and refund terms with the school and your state regulator before enrolling.