If a new era for the National Association of Realtors includes modernizing tools and better serving members, it also involves staying out of the way.
NAR President Kevin Brown said on Thursday that leadership of the 1.47 million-member organization will continue looking for ways to remove itself from rule-making at the local level.
“We don’t dictate what’s right and wrong about a system. We are going to let the marketplace dictate, you know, what’s best for the members,” Brown said on stage at Inman Connect New York. “We think that locally, the local marketplaces should dictate what’s best for those local marketplaces.”
That stance was in large part dictated by a monumental loss in court as well as guidance that NAR has received from the Department of Justice.
“When we were hauled into the DOJ a year or so ago, a couple years ago, they were criticizing our rules, our rulemaking,” Brown said. “We asked them, ‘Do you want us to not have any rules at all?’ and they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no. We want you to have rules.’
(l to r) Brad Inman and Kevin Brown | Credit: AJ Canaria Creative Services
“But we want to have rules that benefit our members, protect the consumer, that give transparency to the process, that has clean, accurate data, and that gives the consumer the most exposure to the marketplace.”
NAR worked with a law firm to evaluate the risk related to some of its policies, including rules around access to multiple listing services. Some of the resulting changes are centered around national rulemaking, Brown said.
In November, the NAR board repealed a policy from its MLS Handbook that stated the organization was “firmly and unequivocally committed” to the principle of requiring Realtor membership to access Realtor-affiliated MLSs.
Access to the MLS, the group said in a statement after the vote, instead “is a matter of local discretion” — and it moved to approve various changes aimed at reinforcing that principle during its biannual conference in Houston.
The future of the MLS system was a hot topic throughout the Inman Connect conference this week.
On Tuesday, Compass CEO Robert Reffkin suggested there should be one single nationwide MLS that’s co-owned equally by the brokerages that rely on data sharing to facilitate real estate transactions. He also said that agents shouldn’t be required to pay NAR if they don’t want to, and called for more lenient MLS rules that give agents more authority in how they market homes.
CanopyMLS CEO Anne Marie DeCatsye suggested a more appropriate number of MLSs could be closer to 25, down from over 500 today.
Brown’s comments Thursday suggested that, as the industry heads for a debate that could rewrite the makeup of the MLS system, NAR will take a back seat.
“The marketplace, we feel, should determine what’s best,” he said. “Whether it’s some competing system or an existing system … we’re not going to get involved.”
Like NAR CEO Nykia Wright a day earlier, Brown noted that NAR has created a data-sharing product called Realtor Property Resource, and he suggested that it could be a piece of the future of the MLS.
“It is similar in a way in terms of collecting data,” Brown said. “It’s the largest database in the U.S. It’s a tremendous tool.”
But he stopped short of overtly calling for RPR to be at the center of whatever the MLS looks like in the future.
Instead, Brown said NAR would focus on using its nationwide advocacy network to focus on doubling the capital gains tax exemption on home sales and removing local zoning barriers that stifle housing supply.
“NAR is going to be focusing on the issues that are impacting our members’ day-to-day business, like financing, insurance, inventory, barriers to homeownership and zoning restrictions,” Brown said.
