For some in this industry, it’s a seasonal activity -- a season that opens in the late fall as the holidays approach and continues through the following March.
When the leaves turn, experienced MLS and local REALTOR® association staffs can feel it coming and set about preparing elaborate battle strategies to avoid it.
Notice after notice is sent -- by email, snail mail, MLS log-in pages, newsletters, websites, meeting announcements, letters to brokers, managers and word of mouth through anyone who will listen.
Still the “witching hour” approaches and still its certainty defies logic and rational thinking.
Soon volunteer leaders are pulled into the nightmare as termination policies and political realities are reviewed and restated. Chief executive’s faces become set in an almost permanent months-long grimace. Staff members begin double checking their remaining sick days as the stress and tension build.
With but two weeks to go the estimates of just how big this year’s event could be get firmer. Fortunately, some of the agony of those final days is broken by holiday joy, but all too soon the Big Day arrives and one of the strangest events in all of real estate begins anew.
What is this phenomenon that causes such heart aches, stress, expense and wasted time?
Of course, it’s the annual epidemic caused by agents who fail to pay their REALTOR® dues or MLS fees on time. Or, in the current case, agents who, after four years of notices, failed to accomplish two simple hours of NAR mandated Code of Ethics refresher training.
Of course, as is often the case, the burden of resolving this challenge is not laid upon the guilty, but rather the hapless staff members who must now put on their black hats and begin taking the myriad steps necessary to suspend or drop the errant agents from membership.
As if this task is not enough punishment, what then ensues can only be described as cruelty, as these same hard working folks are forced to sit through weeks of lame, rarely credible excuses delivered by sarcastic, bombastic, hypercritical and often hostile individuals who claim they are being discriminated against by a system that is denying their ability to make a living merely because they failed to meet their financial obligations.
No amount of humor can explain what this grinding process does to even the most dedicated staffers. Imagine spending eight hours on the phone day after day with supposedly adult professionals who seem incapable of either accepting responsibility or communicating in a manner that even approaches decency, let alone a shred of respect.
Enthusiasm flags and then fails, energy is sapped and stress related symptoms follow. Before long the morning sick call becomes an institutional defense mechanism.
While the delinquent dues rate is always embarrassing, this year it was downright humiliating. Across the country thousands of agents were dropped from membership for failing to meet a minimal financial obligation.
But even more outrageously, thousands upon thousands had to have their memberships suspended for failing to meet the moral obligation of two hours of quadrennial ethics training to better protect their clients. An ethical commitment clearly made when they joined the REALTOR® family.
For readers whose background on this subject may be incomplete, it may help to understand that every local REALTOR® association in the country went to amazing lengths to make this training easily available over the past year and a half.
Forgetting for a moment that by spending two hours at home one could take the refresher course via the Internet, the innovative training alternatives offered by these associations spanned the range -- from renting football stadiums to offering New Year’s Day classes for the seriously delinquent.
Still the result was the same, and the long anticipated pain proved to be even worse than imagined. Over the coming months thousands of man hours and equal amounts of dollars will be spent putting the puzzle back together – hours that could be better spent creating cutting edge services and programs.
What causes this annual shamefest doesn’t really matter. Perhaps it’s akin to the maladies that cause pods of whales to ground themselves or herds of lemmings to jump off cliffs or flocks of birds to freeze on overhead lines.
In the final analysis, it just doesn’t matter. It’s time to change the basic dynamic.
This industry is now collectively reaching upward for a new level of care and professionalism. Motivated by the benefits of doing what is right, stimulated by the rewards of profit formulas that work, facilitated by emerging technologies and spurred on by enlightened consumers ready to reward the right experience, today’s winning brokers are clearly moving in a direction that will soon define an exciting new customer experience in the transaction.
Setting higher standards of practice have become an integral part of this broker-inspired movement. This is not a revolution of philosophy, but rather a return to the entrepreneurial thinking that built this great industry. It is sweeping across the industry with a growing level of passion.
Moving forward winning brokers will expanding beyond the recruitment of marginal players who might get lucky and make a sale.
Instead, they’ll be out recruiting the caliber of individual who understands the need to meet one’s professional obligations, who truly believes in creating the ultimate customer experience, and whose sense of personal ethics means you pay your bills on time, you support your broker and your brokerage team, and you work to make the term REALTOR® something special.
Last month the legendary California Association of REALTORS®, whose members constitute the “advance guard” of the industry, announced the start of their transactional standards initiative. Likewise, across the country associations are lining up to be Charter Members in the founding of the Real Estate Standards Institute.
The message is that there is a right way to do things and that is what this industry is determined to do.
For the brokerage community, this surge towards standards represents an endorsed redemption. Seize the moment, define your vision, set your objectives, inculcate your standards and fill your bus with those who understand that it is time to do it right.
