Ken Montville

Or, how about this: leave everything as it is and just start enforcing ethics standards and professional standards (such as they are) more rigorously and with penalties that catch your attention. The challenge, as I see, it is not with compensation, experience, education or any of this other stuff. It's with the amazing tolerance the profession has with wrongdoers and corner cutters. Some of the more "experienced" agents I know are also ones that could care less about the consumer or the competition since their personal business practices are unscrupulous, to put it kindly. When I think of "raising the bar" I'm not worried about incompetent morons. Natural selection will take care of those folks. I'm concerned about the con man and the crook who spend year after year ruining the profession's reputation while padding their own bank account. Ken Montville the MD Suburbs of DC www.MDSuburbs.com

There is no doubt that NAR is a helluva political lobbying machine. Yes. They have tons of money to spread around. Yet, NAR leadership often sees their "grassroots" Calls to Action as lethargic. Why? Because dues are mandatory and the price of not being a member of NAR while trying to engage in real estate brokerage services (the boyfriend in the play not withstanding)is prohibitive. In other words, you need to pay to play. As a result of taking members for granted since dues aren't in jeopardy, NAR accepts the trade-off of an indifferent membership that cannot be mobilized for the really important stuff. My personal opinion is that raising the bar is not a NAR responsibility. That's more of a local or State association's job. My thing with NAR is that if "constituent" services do not match those of the politicians they try to influence, NAR will eventually lose the power they currently enjoy. Ditto, if they take their eye off the ball while up and coming competitors for Realtor dollars and mindshare such as Zillow, Trulia and others make serious headway. Having blathered on about that long enough, I will say that the current NAR President seems to be aware of general member discontent and seems to want to do something about it. Ken Montville the MD Suburbs of DC www.MDSuburbs.com

Here's a prediction for you: If #6 and #12 come even close to reality than #13 will be a Joe Ferrara long time cause celebre -- the pro bono real estate transaction. Either that or Realtors and real estate licensees will cease to be independent contractors and sign up as low-cost employees(complete with benefits)with the huge real estate conglomerates resulting from ongoing consolidation within the profession (why do people keep calling real estate an "industry"?). Ken Montville the MD Suburbs of DC www.MDSuburbs.com