Executive Director Phillip T. Fisher To Retire After 34 Years of Service

Phillip T. Fisher, Executive Director of the Real Estate Commission, will retire April 1 after 34 years of service, it was announced by Commission Chairman Marsha H. Jordan.

Fisher is the longest-serving administrator of the Commission since its creation as the North Carolina Real Estate Licensing Board in 1957. Joining the Board in 1975 as Administrative Assistant to Secretary-Treasurer Blanton Little, he then succeeded Little upon his retirement in 1981.

In 1983, the Licensing Board was renamed the Real Estate “Commission” and his title changed to Executive Director. He prides himself on never having missed a Commission meeting in his nearly 29-year career as Secretary-Treasurer and Executive Director.

A Kannapolis native, Fisher graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1970. While serving as a Sergeant in the US Army Reserves, he entered the real estate business as a broker and then vice-president of Fisher Real Estate of Kannapolis, also becoming one of the state’s first real estate instructors.

In his more than three decades with the Commission, he witnessed the expansion of the Commission from five to nine members and a four-fold growth in the number of real estate licensees from approximately 25,000 to nearly 100,000. The Commission also expanded from less than a dozen primarily clerical positions to fifty-four including professionals in law, education, financial auditing, and investigations.

Fisher led the Commission through a period of substantial change in the licensing and regulation of the real estate profession in North Carolina as the marketplace became increasingly more sophisticated and complicated.

To assist licensees in navigating the growing complexity of the business and to protect the interest of consumers, he developed the largest publications program of any real estate licensing regulatory organization in the United States and abroad.

To assist the Commission in shaping policy, he also planned, facilitated the discussions and prepared the reports for numerous advisory committees addressing such issues as agency disclosure, broker-in-charge responsibilities, community association management, incentive disclosure, interstate brokerage cooperation, specialty licensing and vacation rental management.

He was also instrumental in the formulation of the residential square footage guidelines and the formation of what is now The Appraisal Board.

Currently the senior member of the Association of Real Estate License Law Officials (ARELLO), he served as its President in 1991 when he was named by Governor Martin to The Order of the Long Leaf Pine. He is now considered the foremost authority on this awards program and composed in its honor a song, “The Long Leaf Pine”, which has been performed by the North Carolina Symphony.

The Commission congratulates Mr. Fisher on the completion of his long and distinguished service to real estate consumers, practitioners and the citizens of North Carolina and wishes him and his wife, Sandy, much happiness in his well-deserved retirement.