Caring Too Much About Real Estate

No, I'm not at the NAR Legislative Meetings.

I’m not in DC at the NAR Legislative Meetings, formerly known as MidYear.

• I still care about my friends and colleagues.

• I still care about and am passionately engaged with private property rights issues.

• I am still an active Realtor® and broker/owner of a real estate firm.

Now that I’ve cleared that up, I’ll tell you why I’m missing these meetings for the first time in years. I care too much to keep feeding the charade that NAR has become. Our professional lives are at stake, yet the organization remains unfocused on its core mission.

What core mission, you say? EXACTLY. I dare *anyone* to state in a concise and defensible manner what the core mission of the National Association of Realtors is, in 2025.

Are we an advocacy organization? I challenge that, after having many conversations with elected officials who are dismissive, at best, of the real estate lobby. Our clout has been diminished more with each passing election season-one side says we’re ‘too woke’ and the other side says we’re ‘not progressive enough’. (sources not cited for ALL of the obvious reasons)

The proof of this is that we have expended an enormous amount of money and energy fighting for increased tax protections for the top 1% of New York and California households with the SALT insistence. The fact that the NAR felt obligated to protect someone’s ability to deduct $40,000 in property taxes is a slap in the face to a homeowner in my county who MAKES $40,000 in a calendar year. We’ve spent more dollars and energy promoting an Obama-era policy known as AFFH: Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. A policy which is not about fair housing but is instead about Federal overreach on local zoning. Tone-deaf policy promotion in an era that demands nuance-not a sledgehammer.

I defended this organization for years as the common sense trade org, which worked for every citizen regarding the essential nature of homeownership as the American Dream. Now, we’re fighting for the ultra-wealthy and the Federal bureaucracy while so many of our members struggle to find any options at all for the first-time buyer or for the bottom-up governance that has served the nation so well.

Make it make sense.

Are we a member-driven organization? I challenge that, since I talk to everyday members (aka those NOT in leadership and those who have no idea there are meetings in DC this week), and they feel abandoned/sold out/harmed by the constant lawfare and settlements which have fed the mainstream media ammunition. These everyday members don’t make huge money. They enjoy real estate and enjoy service and have done NOTHING wrong, but are being hammered every day for the crime of making a living as independent contractors. It seems that a new article is published daily about why agents don’t deserve to make a living. Where is the organization to defend its members? The messaging instead tells agents to adapt, to manage, to sell their own value-and while all of those are critical to surviving market and structural changes-it would seem that a trade organization built on members would defend those very members.

I know what housing means. What homeownership means-how visceral it is. I know how hard agents work. This nation would look vastly different without the robust real estate market and the agents who make that market work. The market itself would look wildly different without the free and fair access to information known as the multiple listing service. In fact, the nation and real estate would look different without the wonderful work that the NAR has done over the past 100 years.

Could I have chosen to invest more of the limited commodity known as time at these meetings? Yes, but my priorities look different and my pathway to helping protect real estate looks different as well. It’s not necessarily the path I would have taken but it’s where I have landed. I have relationships and cell phone numbers AND a brain. I’ll still do whatever I can for this profession I love-and when the pieces finish falling, I’ll be ready to help pick them up to reconstitute a new organization.

Nature abhors a vacuum, after all.