When John M. Dwelle entered the real estate business in Charlotte in 1936, the North Carolina population stood at just over 3.5 million. When J. C. Noggle entered the business in Hickory in 1950, it had risen to just over four million.
On May 15, with the state now home to more than eight million residents, the Commission honored Dwelle (Licensee #11) and Noggle (Licensee #10) along with Charles C. Cameron (Licensee #5) who was not able to attend.
The occasion marked the 45th anniversary of the passage of the North Carolina Real Estate License Law that governs the actions of the state’s nearly 80,000 active and inactive broker and salesperson licensees.
To find the honorees, the Commission searched its records of the first 45 real estate licenses issued to determine those whose licenses are still current and had not during any period become expired.
The Real Estate License Law became effective on July 1, 1957, with 2,300 persons receiving licenses by year’s end under the law’s “grandfather clause.” In December 1957, the first licensing examination was administered. Fifty brokers and twenty-six salespersons passed and were licensed. By comparison, 1,476 have passed the examination in the first four months of 2002. The number of licenses issued since 1957 now nears 200,000.
Both Dwelle and Noggle reminisced with Commission members about their early years in the business.
Dwelle recalled his first job in real estate at the age of 13 in 1927 riding his bike to collect monthly rents from tenants for his uncle. He was paid $1 for each collection.
Noggle, the first licensee and GRI from Hickory, remembers an unscrupulous practitioner offering to veterans for $100 “100% VA loans” that never materialized. It was this type of activity, he said, that motivated him to work for several years during the 1950’s for the establishment of the license law.
Because of the date of his entry into the business in 1936, Dwelle actually held a very early real estate license that had been legislated in 1927. That state law, however, covered only eight counties – Buncombe, Durham, Forsythe, Guilford, Henderson, Lee, Rowan and Wake – and was declared unconstitutional in 1939.
Over six-and-a-half decades as a licensee, Dwelle was always in business for himself as the broker for his firm, John M. Dwelle Company. A generalist, he was involved with residential and commercial sales and rentals, property management and property insurance. He joined the Charlotte Board of REALTORS® in 1941 when, he recalls, there were about 60 members and contributed to the founding of the board’s MLS in the late 1940s.
Noggle has been a major developer in Hickory and Catawba County. He built the first office building in Hickory and the first shopping center along with planning and building a number of residential subdivisions. Active with the North Carolina Association of REALTORS®, he attended 30 state conventions, and in 1956-57 worked on the legislative committee to move the new license law through the legislature. He helped found the Hickory-Catawba Valley MLS and was twice president of its board.
Both honorees, now in their 80s, still use their licenses to help with transactions from time to time.
This article came from the June 2002-Vol33-1 edition of the bulletin.