Hawaii Real Estate Broker Exam — Study Guide

This chapter covers Hawaii law only. Agency theory, fair housing at the federal level, RESPA and TILA, financing, valuation and the arithmetic are in the national portion you have just read. What follows is the 50 scored items that only a Hawaii candidate sits — in the order PSI prints them, and sized to what each area is actually worth.

1. What the Hawaii state portion actually is

Hawaii's examination is delivered by PSI under candidate information bulletin 1664, the edition effective January 16, 2026. The broker paper is not shaped the way most states' are, and the first thing to get right is the count:

Read that table twice. The broker paper is 125 questions but 130 points, because the uniform broker portion contains items scored at up to two points. The familiar "80 + 50 = 130 questions" figure that most secondary sources repeat for Hawaii brokers is actually the salesperson paper. If a book tells you the Hawaii broker exam has 130 questions, it has confused points with questions, or brokers with salespersons.

Passing is 75% for brokers — 70% for salespersons — and it is applied per section. A candidate who passes one section and fails the other retakes only the failed section, within two years of the section already passed.

Here is the state content outline, with the broker item counts:

Hawaii's state portion is unusually substantive rather than license-law-heavy. Six of the nine areas — ownership, title, contracts, financing, escrow and material facts — are about the property and the transaction, not about the license. Only one area, Professional Practices and Conduct, is license law proper, and even that is a quarter of the paper. Compare a state whose entire state portion is licensing, advertising and trust accounts: Hawaii is not that exam. Two-thirds of your revision here belongs to Hawaii's substantive law — the Land Court, conveyance tax and HARPTA, chapter 508D disclosure, chapter 521 tenancies, chapter 514B condominiums, chapter 449 escrow.

Note also where the broker paper differs from the salesperson paper: Contracts rises from 5 items to 7 and Escrow from 3 to 4, while Ascertaining and Disclosing Material Facts falls from 8 to 7, Types of Ownership from 4 to 3 and Professional Practices and Conduct from 14 to 13. Property Management stays at 5, and the outline flags commercial real estate management inside it as broker only.

Two warnings about the source documents.

First, do not study from the copy of this outline hosted on files.hawaii.gov. That file dates from 2011. The total is still 50, which is exactly why the substitution is easy to miss, but the distribution was substantially rewritten in the years since: Financing 4 → 2, Contracts 8 → 7, Types of Ownership 5 → 3, Property Management 3 → 5, Title and Conveyances 4 → 6, Professional Practices and Conduct 12 → 13. The stale file is still a top web-search result. PSI's live bulletin is the authority.

Second, the bulletin publishes no statute or rule references at all. Its eighteen pages carry registration, fees, identification, security and scoring procedures, the two content outlines and five sample questions; the only law it cites anywhere is its own examination-security language. It names Hawaii statutes only inside subtopic labels — "Seller Disclosure Law," "Residential Landlord-Tenant Code," "Professional and Vocational Licensing Act," "HARPTA, GET" — with no section numbers and no currency dates. Every citation in this chapter is therefore drawn from primary sources: the Hawaii Revised Statutes and Hawaii Administrative Rules chapter 16-99 as posted by the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs. If you go to check a section yourself, note that www.capitol.hawaii.gov sits behind a filter that refuses automated requests; data.capitol.hawaii.gov serves the identical files.

2. Ascertaining and Disclosing Material Facts (7 items, 14%)

The bulletin's subtopics, verbatim: 1. Bureau of Conveyances/Land Court — a. Documents and indexes, b. Conveyance tax. 2. Tax Office — a. Tax maps, b. Real property taxes and assessments, c. Other state taxes (e.g., HARPTA, GET). 3. Statutory disclosures — a. Seller Disclosure Law, b. Leasehold disclosures, c. Planned Community Associations, d. Distressed Property and Short Sales. 4. Environmental conditions. 5. Hawaii land history and property rights.

Two record systems in one bureau

Hawaii runs a Regular System and a Land Court (Torrens) system side by side inside the Bureau of Conveyances, and they work differently. For Land Court property, HRS § 501-101 provides that no deed, mortgage or other voluntary instrument "shall take effect as a conveyance or bind the land, but shall operate only as a contract between the parties, and as evidence of authority to the registrar or assistant registrar to make registration," and that "the act of registration shall be the operative act to convey or affect the land." Ownership is evidenced by the transfer certificate of title, and HRS § 501-82 holds a purchaser for value in good faith free of everything except the encumbrances noted on that certificate. Delivery of a signed deed passes title in the Regular System; in Land Court it does not. Filing the same instrument in the Regular System instead files it in the wrong register altogether and leaves the certificate of title unchanged. Parcels are identified throughout by tax map key — zone, section, parcel.

Two state taxes that surface in every file

Conveyance tax, HRS chapter 247. § 247-2 runs two rate ladders. The general one runs from ten cents per $100 for property worth under $600,000 up to one dollar per $100 at $10,000,000 or more. The second, in § 247-2(2), applies "for the sale of a condominium or single family residence for which the purchaser is ineligible for a county homeowner's exemption on property tax," and runs from fifteen cents to one dollar twenty-five per $100 across the same value bands. It is a genuinely different table, not the same table doubled, and the difference at the top is 25%, not 100%. Note who pays: § 247-4 charges the tax to the grantor or seller — so a purchaser's exemption status sets the rate on a bill the seller settles. It is due no later than 90 days after the taxable transaction and in any event before the certificate seal is imprinted.

HARPTA, HRS § 235-68. Section 235-68(b) makes every transferee — the buyer — "deduct and withhold a tax equal to 7.25 per cent of the amount realized" on the disposition of Hawaii real property when the seller is a nonresident person, and makes the withholder personally liable for it. Section 235-68(c) requires the buyer to file a return of the amount withheld with the Department of Taxation within 20 days of the transfer date. Two features are tested: the base is the amount realized, not the seller's gain, and the obligation runs to the buyer even though escrow performs the mechanics. Fifteen per cent is the federal FIRPTA rate, which can apply on top for a foreign seller. Section 235-68(d) excuses withholding on an affidavit of resident status and § 235-68(e) lets the seller apply for a withholding certificate.

Chapter 508D: the seller disclosure regime and its clocks

HRS chapter 508D governs sales of residential real property — fee simple or leasehold, one to four dwelling units, or a residential condominium or cooperative apartment. The seller delivers the disclosure statement no later than ten calendar days from acceptance of the purchase contract (§ 508D-5(a)). The buyer then has fifteen calendar days to examine it and decide whether to rescind (§ 508D-5(b)); written notification must reach the seller inside those fifteen days, and failing to deliver it "shall be deemed an acceptance of the disclosure statement." Rescission under this subsection is without loss of deposits, which "shall be immediately returned to the buyer" — a Hawaii rule worth knowing, because a rule that forfeits the deposit gets it exactly backwards. The parties may agree in writing to shorten or extend either period (§ 508D-5(c)).

§ 508D-6 is the second clock. A buyer who receives a statement that "fails to disclose a material fact or contains an inaccurate assertion that directly, substantially, and adversely affects the value" of the property, and who did not know of it, may elect in writing to rescind within fifteen calendar days of the earlier of discovery or receipt of a corrected statement. The right has a hard end point: it "shall not apply if the sale … has been recorded," though other remedies survive. And the seller's agent has a parallel duty at § 508D-7(c) — on becoming aware of facts inconsistent with or contradictory to the statement, the agent must disclose them to the seller, the buyer and the buyer's agent.

§ 508D-3.5 adds the association package where the property is subject to a recorded declaration: the articles or other creating document, the bylaws, the declaration and organizational documents with exhibits, and any rules on use of common areas, architectural control, maintenance or assessments — plus, under subsection (b), restrictions imposed by deed covenants or another recorded document, including unrecorded rules issued by whoever enforces them. Timing: the seller need not produce them until ten calendar days after both parties have received a current title report, and the buyer then has fifteen calendar days to examine and rescind — a right that stacks on top of §§ 508D-5, 508D-6 and 508D-13. Subsection (d) allows delivery by internet address with the buyer's consent; subsection (e) provides that complying "shall fulfill the seller's duty of disclosure of material facts relating to a recorded declaration."

§ 508D-8 excludes two categories from the statement: that an occupant had AIDS or was tested for HIV, and events with no effect on the physical structure or environment of the property.

Environmental conditions: five mapped areas, not four

§ 508D-15(a) requires the seller to disclose that the property lies within any of five mapped areas: the special flood hazard area, airport noise exposure areas, military Air Installation Compatible Use Zones, tsunami inundation areas, and the sea level rise exposure area designated by the Hawaii climate change mitigation and adaptation commission. That fifth item was added by Act 179 in 2021 and amended in 2023 — any Hawaii disclosure list showing four mapped areas predates it and is out of date. The duty is conditional on "the availability of maps that designate the five areas by tax map key (zone, section, parcel)," and each county must supply legible copies. § 508D-15(b) adds a shoreline duty: permitted and unpermitted erosion control structures, permit expiration dates, notices of alleged violation and fines. Subsection (c) construes genuine map ambiguity in the seller's favor where a good faith effort was made; subsection (d) confirms the seller has no duty to examine any other public record.

Hawaii land history is a material-facts item, not decoration

HRS § 7-1, a survivor of the nineteenth-century land division, is titled "Building materials, water, etc.; landlords' titles subject to tenants' use." It preserves the right of the people on each land to take firewood, house-timber, aho cord, thatch, or ki leaf from the land on which they live for their own private use — though not to sell for profit — and provides that "the springs of water, running water, and roads shall be free to all, on all lands granted in fee simple," excepting wells and watercourses individuals have made for their own use. Article XII, section 7 of the state constitution protects traditional and customary rights on the same footing. A buyer can therefore acquire fee simple Hawaii land carrying access and gathering rights that no deed ever granted. That is a material fact to raise at the listing appointment, not at closing.