Dale Stinton, National Association of Realtors (NAR) CEO, spoke here at Inman Connect about their recent 900 person board meeting. In that meeting they came away with 13 “exciting initiatives” (time will tell if that’s a prophetic number…) that they were going to do.
Interesting tidbits:
- NAR wants to play directly with the consumer
- Raising NAR dues gives them $100 million to play with
- NAR wants to be the consumer advocate to Washington DC
Is it just me, or does anyone really think that an organization that moves as ponderously slowly as NAR, and needs 900 people to reach consensus for any decision, really has a chance to play in the fast-moving and dynamic consumer market?
How many large organizations have been able to make a web-play that actually works? If tech giants like Microsoft can’t even buy their way into the consumer market, how realistic is it for NAR?
I might be being overly pessimistic on this. Dale did mention that they wanted to be the consumer’s advocate lobbying in DC. Okay, I can buy that. How though? How are you going to get consumers to pay attention to you online?
Dale mentioned that Realtor.com has fallen behind, but that when they catch up, they won’t fall behind again. Technically, that’s possible, I just don’t believe they can do it. There’s a lot of catch-up that will have to be done, as the Trulia’s, eppraisal.com’s and Zillow’s of the world keep innovating and winning the attention of the average American.
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5 users responded in this post
You nuts???
Are you kidding, you’re right on the money. The NAR is a reactive organization not a trailblazer. The NAR focus is protect not serve, talk a lot, act as little as needed.
Hi John. Yeah, this was kind of a jaw-dropping moment for me.
HA! You guys think you have it bad! Try Canada… Have you seen mls.ca?
Realtor.com certainly has no intention of “trailblazing” much of anything. But they’re starting to make noise about becoming more of a “fast follower”, whatever that means.
The real estate industry is changing fast one area that I have been really disappointed is the rise of these web valuation sites although there has been one that I feel that has some potential. I have been surprised by housefront.com, over the last several weeks I have compared the estimated values to the selling price of houses that have sold through my agency and on average have seen give or take about 10% variation from Housefront’s estimates; which is accurate enough to be very useful to me especially with the mobile text messaging feature. If Housefront continues to add more useful features I believe it can be a powerful resource. What has really disappointed me about other similar services is that even though more visually appealing they have tended to be very inaccurate.
Lauren