Now that ARA has our attention, what's on the menu?

On Aug. 19, Inman ran a headline that included a question. “ARA has the stage. What will it take to stay in the spotlight?” Marian McPherson laid out the momentum fairly.

• 30,000 members
• Partnerships with REMAX and Compass that could push that toward 100,000 by year’s end
• A chief lobbyist hired 

Then the piece named the 800-pound gorilla and left the question there.

I would like to answer it.

If you asked me what the American Real Estate Association would have to put on the table before an agent sends them a dollar, I could tell you in five minutes, and none of it is complicated.

Think about a new restaurant opening across the street from one everybody is frustrated with. Frustration might get people through the door once. But eventually, they’re going to sit down and ask the question that matters: What’s on the menu?

That is where ARA is right now.

It is not enough to be the alternative to an organization that agents are frustrated with. At some point, ARA has to clearly show agents what it offers, what it stands for and what they actually get for their dues.

A sentence that does not contain the word NAR

Listen to ARA’s founders describe the organization and count how long it takes before the other association comes up. In the Inman piece, Mauricio Umansky said, “We’re going to fight until something changes, even if that’s something as simple as NAR being better.”

I believe he meant that sincerely, but he is describing an organization whose victory condition is a change in somebody else’s behavior. An organization cannot grow and sustain itself on anger toward another organization.

Grievance is a wonderful way to open the doors and a terrible way to keep them open, because the day the other guy improves, your reason for existing improves right along with him and quietly disappears.

Benefits an agent can read on one page

Give me a mission statement I could read out loud to a brand-new agent who has never heard of either group, and that agent should be able to tell me what you are for.

Not a philosophy. A page. Here is what your money buys, here is when you get it, here is who to call. Every association I know of in existence could produce that page in four seconds.

Transparency about the money

Thirty thousand members at $20 is $600,000. So, the questions those members ought to be asking are the simplest ones:

• Where did it go?
• What did it buy?
• Where is the line-item breakdown?

Without an answer, the cynical read is that this is a money grab. I am not saying that it is. I am saying that an organization which won’t show you the ledger has no way to prove that it isn’t.

Fights that belong to somebody else

An association tells you what it is by what it chooses to fight for, and ARA has now chosen twice. Both times it picked a local fight.

The first was Missouri, where voters rejected Amendment 5 on Aug. 4. It would have phased out the state income tax and widened the sales tax base to replace it, and a wider sales tax base is how real estate services end up taxed. That is why the Missouri Association of Realtors and its 25,000 members ran the campaign.

ARA joined roughly three weeks before the vote, late enough that I am not sure it is fair to give them credit for the win.

The second is New York City’s pied-à-terre tax, which lands on homes worth $5 million and above.

My objection is not that ARA picked the wrong state. It’s that a national association is fighting state and city battles at all. An agent in California paid the same $20 into the same national pool that went to a ballot measure in Missouri and a tax fight in Manhattan. Neither will ever touch a closing of hers.

This is the part of NAR that nobody gives credit for. Three tiers: national, state, local. Your dues follow the level of the fight, and the people running it are the ones who live in it. From the outside, that looks like bureaucracy. It is what keeps an agent in Fresno, California, from funding a ballot measure in Missouri. ARA has collapsed all three into one pool and spends it locally.

Watch which fights an association picks before its dues go up, not the ones it promises after. Early priorities are the only honest preview you get.

So when Inman asks what it will take to stay in the spotlight, this is my answer. Stop running against something and start standing for something. Print the page. Open the books. Fight national fights and leave the local ones to the associations that live there. Build a national voice on top of the machinery that already works instead of trying to replace it.

Until then, filling the room was never the hard part. Plenty of restaurants open to a line down the block because everybody is curious and everybody has a grievance with the place across the street. The hard part starts when people sit down. And I am still waiting for ARA’s menu.