Photo by Craig Hodge

One of Canada’s longest-serving executive officers has retired from the real estate industry. Ken MacKenzie was originally hired by B.C.’s Fraser Valley Real Estate Board (FVREB) in 1979. During the 30 years since, MacKenzie and the FVREB have been prominently involved in a number of key technology initiatives that are now national in scope, including MLS.ca (now Realtor.ca), RealtorLink and Webforms. Regionally, MacKenzie’s board helped break new ground by joining with the boards of neighbouring Vancouver and Chilliwack to create a single Lower Mainland MLS system for the all three boards to access in 2002. Two years later, alongside the Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton boards in the REB4 group, FVREB helped launch the cross-border MLXchange, a single commercial MLS system linking Realtors across the B.C./Alberta border.

During his final month as FVREB executive officer, MacKenzie talked about some of his board’s successes and challenges with REM senior editor Kathy Bevan.

REM: Your Fraser Valley board, with its 3,000 members, has been very active on the national a well as the local stage – what are some of the factors that have made that possible over your past 30 years as EO of FVREB?

MacKenzie: The size of our board seems to be really good. We can do certain things because we have a good, solid membership, but we’re still small enough to be able to react rapidly and to make changes quickly.

We have had a lot of successes. We were not founders of MLS.ca and RealtorLink, but we were certainly in the leading group for MLS.ca and for RealtorLink. Those two initiatives – that are serving the real estate industry so well – were part of our initial plans and we were one of the two or three boards that were pressing for these initiatives at the beginning.
We now have five boards in the group that share an MLS system – the three of us (Fraser Valley, Vancouver and Chilliwack boards), plus the B.C. Northern and the Kootenay boards. The REB4 group has been a real benefit to us too. Joining together with Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton has given us a combined purchasing power that has been significant. We’ve also benefited from our combined intellect. When we’re able to get together as a group, we can brainstorm and come up with some great ideas.

We have a culture here in B.C. of pulling together. We have a Spirit of Co-operation agreement among all the boards in B.C. The model here is that you can list a property anywhere in the province on any MLS system in B.C. A Prince George Realtor can list a property in the Fraser Valley on our MLS system.

It’s a model that others are looking at. It’s been unique in Canada and it’s worked superbly for us.

Locally, we developed Webforms that are now being used by 70,000 Realtors in Canada. Every real estate board in Canada is now on Webforms. We recently entered into the U.S. and did a test market in Minnesota, bringing Webforms to their 20,000 members. That’s going over really well and I expect we’ll see future developments of Webforms outside the country.

REM: What would you say has had the greatest influence on Realtors and boards over the past three decades?

MacKenzie: The switch in technology has been the biggest influence over the past 30 years. Thirty years ago, who would have thought of an MLS.ca or Realtor.ca or intranet or anything of that nature? We were still printing out listing cards.

The world is changing so rapidly, Realtors need to keep at the forefront and they are hoping their boards will help keep them there. It’s important for boards to be leaders.

Disintermediation hasn’t gone away – in particular, there are still a lot of technical people who would like to see Realtors eliminated by technology. We need to stay abreast of modern technology to ensure that the Realtor does stay at the centre of the transaction.

REM: How has the role of executive officer changed since you first took on this position in 1979?

MacKenzie: It’s a leadership role today, whereas it was an administrative role before. Boards didn’t look to staff 30 years ago for the leadership they look to staff to provide today. If you’re not involved in and leading strategic planning, you’re not being an effective leader today. And you build a team around you. The measure of my success is not me, it’s the people I have around me. You couldn’t possibly have one person doing all of the work that the team does here.

REM: Early in your tenure, communication between your board and your members was a challenge. How has that communication changed over the years?

MacKenzie: We struggle with it constantly – it’s like the old expression, “they don’t read what we send them”. That’s as true here as it is anywhere.

We have a rule of five, which is we communicate five ways with our members whenever we have anything important to communicate. We have newsletters we send our brokers, newsletters we send to members, emails, flyers about education seminars – a whole raft of ways we communicate.

One of the best communications we have, though, is through our breakfast meetings. Every year we hold five different breakfast meetings throughout the board. We invite all the members to come out for a free breakfast and we go through a presentation of two and a half hours of material to update them on everything we think they need to know or ought to know. This is board-driven, just trying to get messages across. It’s become very successful, so we’ve expanded it and emphasized it more over the years.

REM: Another challenge for FVREB during your tenure was the anti-competition investigation the Competition Bureau launched in the late 1990s against your board and others. Do you think this past history makes your members more aware about anti-competition concerns?

MacKenzie: We had good company back then – there were nine different boards across the country that were served by search warrants. We went through 10 years of hell with that, with both the Competition Bureau investigation and a lawsuit that followed.

I tell members to think of a meeting as a transcript. You can be sitting around the table and someone makes some smart-alecky remark about doing something wrong, as black humour. When you put that into a transcript, it doesn’t come across as humour at all and it can be devastating. We went through that, because we had tape recordings of meetings and side comments that weren’t even part of the meeting would be twisted to make us look bad.
I know that the Competition Bureau will be anxious to find something that they can sink their teeth into and they’ve warned us that they’re going to be looking for jail terms, if they find anything. But the marketplace has looked after it – there is no such thing as common commission rates, as the business models are all over the wall. So I really don’t think the Bureau has anything to worry about anymore.

REM: The Competition Bureau was raising concerns about MLS.ca, while CREA and real estate boards across the country wrestled with this website’s branding. Now that the site has been rebranded Realtor.ca, do you think your concerns about diluting the MLS brand were justified?

MacKenzie: I had concerns that we were losing the advantage we had with the MLS brand. I recognized the difficulties people were having, because consumers were confusing MLS.ca with what MLS is and misunderstanding things. I never had that concern because I felt that a consumer approaching a Realtor with some misunderstandings was never a bad thing – that’s what a Realtor does, puts aside a consumer’s misunderstandings and explains things. So it’s a good talking point for Realtors, no matter what.

But in any event, the day was won by those who wanted to change the name and I’m very pleased that this didn’t have a devastating effect on the usage of MLS.ca. It’s still an absolutely great, meaningful tool for Realtors and serving them very, very well – it has from the very beginning. And we’ve always felt that our board’s participation helped it along its way. Fraser Valley and a few other boards got it started and we’re pretty proud of that.

The benefit of MLS.ca – now Realtor.ca – is the quantity of data it contains. Virtually all MLS listings in the country are there and the quality is there too – these are all active listings. On other systems you can see listings up there for years after they’ve expired or been sold.
The numbers – three million unique visitors a month – are holding. That’s a very impressive number, in a country with 30 million people.

REM: On a community involvement level, I understand the library on the Surrey campus of Simon Fraser University has been named in perpetuity after the Fraser Valley board?

MacKenzie: We’re very proud of that. We were instrumental in forming a group to get a university south of the Fraser River.

Our participation in post-secondary education south of the Fraser River was really bad. So we set about to see what we could do about that. I joined with two other people and we formed a Fraser Valley University Society, to get a university south of the Fraser River. That evolved and developed and we had thousands of members join that society and we lobbied and pushed and pressed to get a university.

We got the Technical University of B.C. as the first post-secondary degree-granting university south of the Fraser that was a full research university. But it ran into financial difficulties and a new government came in and asked Simon Fraser University (SFU) to come out and take it over and run it as the Surrey campus of SFU. This campus continues to be wildly successful, bursting at the seams, continuing to try to expand to take all the people who want to get into this university.

There’s a huge real estate spin-off. Having a university here attracts business, it attracts people – not only the professors and those working at the university, but just having a university available attracts residents here as well. It’s been a huge boon to Surrey – Surrey now holds the university up as one of the highest benefits of living in Surrey. We’re very proud to have this university here and that the library on campus has been named after the FVREB, with a big plaque acknowledging our contribution to establishing of that university.

Boards and Realtors across the country are doing these kinds of things – our Realty Watch program is another good example – to improve the society that we live in. Realtors are anxious to do that – it’s good for business, but these are their communities too and they want their communities to be successful.

REM: What do you think the focus will be for the real estate industry in the near future, as you step down from your executive position?

MacKenzie: I think the emphasis will be on image and ethical behaviour.

The system that Fraser Valley has here for discipline and for promoting ethics has been copied by many boards. We’ve received several awards for improving ethics – including the Ethics award from CREA this year, which was based on our eight-point program to improve ethics in the industry. I think that the industry will focus there in future – on ethics and professionalism and promoting the image of Realtors.