Re: Montreal board will stay with CREA – for now (REM, November).
Hmmm, 34 per cent of members voted in Montreal and of the 3,453 that bothered to log on to cast the electronic ballot, 59.7 per cent did NOT pick “leave CREA on Jan. 1”.
Based on that, I think their board was correct in assessing that the membership had not endorsed/ratified the board’s recommendation to leave CREA.
But that’s not the “nub” of what’s at stake and in my opinion the discussion about our business’ collective future vision/path is being carried on
1) in the wrong direction
2) by the wrong party/component of organized real estate and
3) with little or no REAL communication with the “silent majority” of registrants who don’t follow the political /organizational shenanigans at the expense-paid travel corp/director levels ….. until it hits their pocket book or results in drastic changes to their local code of ethics and/or standards of business practice.
CREA itself is in danger of becoming the worst-case, projected-possibilities “Realtor-saurus”. Wholly disconnected from the field and the public and sorely in need of a review of its mandate, since ethics/performance standards of members are now handled by provincial legislation.
This years-long and no doubt expensive navel-gazing and restructuring exercise we see CREA conducting should not be directed at the “real estate business” – registered/licensed practitioners – just aimed at the three hierarchical orders of dues-for-services providers that live off the real estate business in the field.
OREA (ContinuingEd-cour$e, Intro-cour$e and initiation dues collector) administers a revolving door policy of recruitment/dream-satisfaction/education for the newbies; CREA (trademark-holder, stats-collector, ineffective lobbyist) makes stupid TV ads and wilts under pressure from every court/competition challenge (because the BofDirectors don’t want to be personally pursued for liability). The MLS-providing local/regional boards and associations are too numerous and varied for me to generalize about. They’re human. Maybe a bit complacent and self-satisfied, but heck, 17 years of up-market has made all of us a bit that way.
REAL QUESTIONS:
Do we (practitioners) want a higher/better standard of service from our provincial/national associations? Put that to a vote – result 99.44 per cent YES.
Do we actually know what we want exactly, to be improved? 99.33 per cent – not exactly, no, but lots of things.
Do the practitioners feel that the current fees are too high? The answer is:
a) No, it’s cheap … if you’re earning a living (minimum one deal/month) or making money (two or three or more deals/month)
b) It’s not the $$ — It’s perceived service received. In addition to being part of an organization that owns the MLS trademark, what else does CREA do for Joe/Jane Registrant?
c) If by having a national organization, the “business” can be attacked by the zealot-making-a name-for-self from the federal Competition Bureau, then maybe we don’t require an attackable national association?
d) If the national/provincial organizations are so far detached from the “business” that hot/cool/normal market doesn’t affect them, then maybe the employees (top to bottom) of these service orgs should be paid based on units traded or have price increases or dollar volume of commission collected. Perhaps they would get their brains in gear to further the business of their members if their paycheque was related to market performance. Perhaps everybody in the service-to-practitioner industry should be on “independent contracts” and paid gross dollars, no deductions and be able to pay for their own benefits/pensions out of their gross (tied to market performance).
Sad but true – a huge number and percentage of practitioners are not making one deal a month. And their needs are different than the members who are doing well.
Without “collusion” we must beef up the standards to allow all the registrants to choose annually whether it’s worth one to five deals a year to pay the hefty fees and take all those up-to-the minute courses and allow the ones who a) are on the way out; b) cooling it for a while; or c) on the way in to enjoy a “special reduced-fee status” where they are registered, are members…. but refer everything to a full-status associate.
Robert Ede
Sales rep
Re/Max Hallmark Realty
Toronto
