A month ago, the president of NAR asked for ideas on solving the housing crisis here. The national convention starts this weekend in Anaheim, and hopefully during the session, he’ll be reviewing thoughts from realtors around the country.
He can start solving the housing problems by changing what it is under his control. My ideas:
As president, don’t just be a figurehead, get something done. Have a real agenda of items that will forward the realtor community, and push to have them implemented. And don’t do what Dick Gaylord did. He was NAR President, accomplished nothing, and now he is bugging realtors to use his lender services. You shouldn’t get to use the office of NAR president as a soliciting tool.
Make our website, realtor.com, the best real estate portal. According to my clients, Redfin’s website is much better. Stop allowing move.com to run a lousy website on our behalf, and then let them pillage us for ridiculously high fees to advertise our own listings.
Develop a specific set of procedures on how every realtor will handle short sales. There is rampant short-sale fraud being inflicted by realtors, because nobody is doing anything to stop it. Realtors won’t play by the rules if there aren’t any.
Be an advocate of foreclosure. You are on the wrong side of this issue. The majority of Americans pay their bills, and are tired of the deadbeats being coddled. Promote foreclosure as the way to solve the housing crisis, because it is.
Support agent scorecards/feedback sites. Realtor.com should promote agent rankings and client feedback systems. Use a system like the one used at ebay, where clients can leave public comments on performance, and agents can rebut those that are negative. Realtor.com should also list how many sales each agent has closed in the last 12 months as an indicator of their proficiency – and no team counts.
Promote open house as a sales tool. Buyers want convenience. Promote broker preview day as a public event, and educate agents on effective open house techniques. And counter the argument that the only thing open houses are good for is to generate leads. Open houses will sell the house – if they have the right price on them.
Ditch the value-range marketing. It sends the wrong message (we don’t know what it’s worth so you figure it out), and is a gimmick that furthers our slimy reputation.
Promote real estate classes as general education in schools.
Teach real estate principals to agents. A broad category, so I’ll give just one example. Recently I had a prominent listing agent tell me when I questioned her price, “The average market time is 115 days in this area, and we’ve only been on the market two months”. But you don’t wake up on that 115th day and find the purchase offer on your fax machine. Teach agents that your best chance of getting top dollar is in the more-urgent first 30 days, and to price accordingly – instead of pricing high and getting stale quickly, resulting in chasing the market down.
Teach real estate salesmanship to agents. When the MLS was founded in the 1960’s, the intent was broker cooperation – that agents work together to help buyers and sellers. These days agents think their job is to fight the other agent.
Enforce the rules and ethics. You don’t have the power to revoke their license, but you can kick them out of the club. If agents saw a few bad apples lose their MLS privileges, everyone would straighten up.
Develop a specific set of procedures on how every realtor will handle short sales. There is rampant short-sale fraud being inflicted by realtors, because nobody is doing anything to stop it. Realtors won’t play by the rules if there aren’t any.
Had our meeting with the seller’s agent. Claims the seller wanted to submit an all cash offer to the bank. It was less than our offer. Oh , the other buyer is represented by someone in the seller’s agent’s office. Nice.
Jim,
Why don’t YOU run the NAR? Just one term could revolutionize real estate in America.
You are a proven quality individual and a credit to what you do unlike 99.9999999999 % of the useless, crooked scum comprising your industry.
Think what one-term of JTR (insisting on educating clients honesty, personal credibilty and individual professionalism at all levels) could accomplish in reforming this bad joke called the NAR and most of the used-house peddlers and associated rabble managing to stay clear of felony charges, for now…
THINK about it.
If anything reflects the NAR it is the Realtor.com website (internetz 1998 anyone?).
Anyone that would do real work and get things done would be smart enough to NEVER seek the presidency. But JTR sums it up nicely.
I’d want to be NAR president after a couple of others blazed the trail of doing something productive. Now it’s just a figurehead position that old fat guys use to pad their resumes, and nothing else.
The first president who actually tries to accomplish somethine would spend their entire term just convincing the staff that they should be doing more than sitting around counting their millions and hiring lobbyists.
The realtor.com website is particularly disturbing in how it’s being used. Move.com is the propreitor in charge of running it, and they’ve parlayed that into a full-blown profit machine on the backs of realtors.
But we own the listings, not move.com.
If you don’t pay them the vig to put your own photo on your listings, they’ll sell the spot to multiple other realtors so it looks like it’s their listing, not yours.
“Lead by example” should be one of the NAR points. Something Jim is doing day in and day out.
NAR backing deadbeats is the wrong way to go. Professionals earn their own they don’t beg for handouts. The people/views/ideology realtors associate themselves with needs to be reevaluated.
If your pockets are deep and you got the gift of gap it’s probably possible to replace the listings service with a competing product. The problem would be operating free and promoting it long enough to reach critical mass. I think the biggest hurdle is getting the listing agents to spend 5-10 minutes to enter a listing in a competing system. Getting potential buyers to the site wouldn’t be as hard.
Forget trying to change NAR. Just replace the only useful thing they have, the MLS.
JTR’s points are spot on. The scorecard/feedback site is imperative to correcting one of the worst images in business. Additionally, setting the entrance bar higher is a must. Besides making the test more challenging all agents should go through some formal interning under an experienced licensed agent/broker, prior to doing a sale. It would be great to know the “weeding” factor the current requirements provide. In college one professor I had would give the most challenging exams but it was the challenge that prepared me and gives my degree value today. I cannot say the same for the real estate licensing process.
As Jim says, NAR is not ready to have him at the helm. Others need to set the tone for constructive change and once there, JTR can take it to the next level.
Being an agent for many years, I am always amazed at the “professionals” that enter the field after taking a simple test. Eventually, most get weeded out but it is the presence of some many under qualified agents that bring the whole industry down.
Standing on my chair clapping enthusiastically.
Reading Jim’s ideas regarding the NAR is just one more example why I believe bubbleinfo is the best real estate site out there. Keep up the awesome work, JtR…
I dunno, I might be satisfied with “enforce the rules and ethics.” NAR is mostly irrelevant, except for that.
I sent this link to Ron Phipps, the president of NAR. He replied:
Thank you Jim:
Will check it out.
ron
“Thank you Jim: Will check it out ron.” – JtR
*Chuckle* Is that code for: “I’ll give it serious consideration when we’re all selling real estate on Jupiter.” ?
great ideas.. Jim For President
I used redfin and sdlookup the most back in the day.