National Association of Realtors CEO Nykia Wright told the audience at Blueprint Las Vegas this week that she has been charged with rebuilding the trade group from the ground up.
That effort requires a packed travel schedule that will see her leave Sin City, where she also attended a one-day event for the Nevada Association of Realtors, to travel to Miami, then White Plains, New York.
Her primary mission? “Restoring trust among Realtors and among consumers. That’s the baseline,” she said. “If I did everything else and not that, then I did not achieve what I was expecting.”
Wright very much sees herself as a turnaround CEO — mission-driven, boots-on-the-ground. “So what was supposed to be a cultural turnaround actually also turned into a financial turnaround,” she said.
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Wright views NAR as a legacy organization that needs to work hard to evade irrelevance. “It took a huge hit in 2023,” she said. “Most legacy companies make their way to the extinction bin if they are not continuing to reinvent themselves. And so my responsibility is to reinvent the organization.”
How the NAR settlement helped Realtors communicate value
Wright believes the post-settlement era is a better opportunity than initially perceived.
“Post-2023, post-settlement, what we are able to do now is allow Realtors who are in the center of the transaction to help people across the country really start managing and discussing their value,” Wright explained. “In today’s world, many Realtors are going around doing a-la-carte pricing, really showing in the consumer’s eyes what they are getting in return. It’s no longer a sort of, ‘set and forget it’ [type of relationship].”
While admitting she enjoys reality real estate shows, she believes shows like Selling Sunset paint an inaccurate portrait of what actual agents do, perpetuating stigmas.
“The problem with [that portrayal] is that at the bottom of the screen, you would always see the 6 percent commission, and people would be drinking champagne, stepping out to brunch,” she observed. “And so we took the consumers for granted, and the consumers took for granted what exactly Realtors are doing to eliminate friction in the transaction.”
Wright used her own recent property purchase to explain some of the more complex transactions and long list of business tasks Realtors can handle. “I travel all the time, so I needed someone to go look at properties for me. And because I didn’t want a lot of people to know I was buying the property, I did it through a private land trust,” she said. “I would not have known how to do that on my own and would absolutely pay a premium for that.”
What NAR can do for its members
Advocacy is clearly the primary objective of the Association, but fully repositioning an aircraft carrier requires more than pulling a few levers. Wright wants NAR to become a consistent, relevant resource for its members by continuing to keep “a human in the loop,” even in the face of rapid technological advancement in the space.
When asked by interviewer Clelia Peters how technology and innovation inform her work, Wright cited the impact of Second Century Ventures, NAR’s startup accelerator. On the topic of tackling her primary mission, Wright was more direct.
“It’s very, very difficult in the same way that some of the startup CEOs or founders on the stage [at Blueprint] are saying its very, very difficult,” she said.
Wright said face time with politicians and industry groups has historically been crucial to providing and sustaining the many advantages of homeownership, from tax breaks to the freedom of short-term renting. “We are sitting at the epicenter of the industry,” Wright said.
“We are the ones that are actually going to Washington D.C., speaking to legislators about the ‘I’s’: inventory, insurance, inflation and interest rates, all things that can be considered an impediment to the success of the people that I’m responsible for, which is Realtors and by extension, consumers around the nation.
“We actually walk these congressmen and -women through the pain points and help them sort of release some of that pressure. That’s very, very significant. And then we go into the education and into the research,” she continued.
“Advocacy’s role is to unlock transaction volume, and help [members] get to their next transaction.”
