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Jason Haber has had a busy year.
Haber is a working Compass broker in New York City, but he catapulted onto the radars of people far from home back in early 2024. That’s when, along with The Agency founder Mauricio Umansky, he launched the American Real Estate Association. The group emerged amid a period of frustration with the National Association of Realtors and has sought a similar advocacy role in the industry.
Since its launch just over a year ago, the American Real Estate Association has racked up a series of notable accomplishments. Last August, it debuted a membership program. This January, it absorbed the New York Residential Agent Continuum (NYRAC), and this week it debuted a proposal meant to bring a resolution to industry fighting over NAR’s Clear Cooperation Policy.
READ MORE ABOUT AREA’S ‘CLEAR COLLABORATION POLICY’
Against that backdrop, Inman reached out to Haber to talk about the issues he sees dominating real estate right now. And Haber immediately pointed to one thing: trust. His point was that agents are not widely trusted, and that needs to change. Haber has thoughts on how to do that, pointing specifically to better industry credentialing. He also shared an update on the American Real Estate Association, which is now in the process of talking to potential sponsors.
What follows is a version of Inman’s conversation with Haber that has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: Talk to me about the biggest issues facing the industry right now. What’s constantly on your mind?
Jason Haber: What’s constantly on my mind is trust with the consumer. What really troubles me is that when you look at public opinion polls, the real estate agent on that list is generally under the used car salesman. I think it’s a crime.
I think it’s a shame and I think we have to change it. Part of the problem is that I feel like the public often misunderstands what we do. The way the public sees real estate agents is very similar to the way the public sees Congress. They love their Congress member, but they hate Congress.
So people like their real estate agent or tend to, but don’t like the industry. So I think we need to be really smart in thinking about how we present what we do and the value prop to the public. I think that would also help with policymakers, because what’s happened is the industry has become a target.
What are the origins of this distrust?
My own theory is that there are just too many darn agents in this country. There are just too many agents chasing too few deals and the bar to entry has been so low. You’ll hear, when you’re out at night, “oh, maybe I’ll just get my license.” Have you ever heard someone say that about their Series 7 [exam that’s required to become a stock broker]? “I wanna go sell Apple stock. Maybe I’ll just go get my broker dealer license or my Series 7 license.”
You’ve never heard that, right? But why is it okay that when it comes to the biggest investment of someone’s life, someone can easily get a license and transact with them? But if someone wants to sell one share of Apple stock, they have to get all this certification. So that’s a big part of the problem, that we’ve encouraged mass licensure. And so when we have the bar that low, we have a lot of non-professionals.
It’s something that we need to change culturally within the industry, but you haven’t heard people talking about this. Obviously NAR benefits from lots of members, right? So there just hasn’t been a push in the industry to say, maybe we need to bring down the number of agents.
How do you bring down the number of agents?
You raise standards. I’m licensed in two states and I thought the New York exam was remarkably lightweight. I just don’t think that the licensing standards are high enough. And I think that would be a good place to start.
How do you make this a viable idea? How do you get more people on board?
Long-term, that’s part of a lobbying effort. So in New York, it’s the Department of State. In other states it’s different agencies. So, working with them to try to raise the standards and make it harder. Maybe it’s the hours, or maybe it’s the coursework itself. There are plenty of people who take all the classes, pay attention, they take the exam and they pass. But they have no idea what to do. So I feel like there’s probably lots of interesting ways for the real estate departments to work with real estate professionals.
In this new environment that we’re envisioning, what role does NAR play? Do they have a place in this world?
Oh yeah, listen, they’ll always have a huge role just based on their size. They’re the biggest trade group in America, the largest political contributor. They’ve been around for over a hundred years.
I think that they can play a very constructive role going forward. I think their size demands that they do. It’s like the old saying, lead or get out of the way. And I hope they lead. Our organization was not formed to be an anti-NAR group. It was to make them better. It was to make the industry better.
Can you share any details about how you guys are doing with your organization?
We just launched a new partnership with NYRAC in New York City. So that’s really our first local chapter, which is really exciting. We’ve had two events already. We had 350 people on a freezing January night come to our first kickoff event, which coincided with the Inman Conference. And then we just did a zoning conference conference, we did this event with the city planning commissioner last week. Had a great crowd.
We’re really happy about that relationship with NYRAC. We hope that’s a model for us for around the country, where we can work with other local groups and have them join us in partnership. That’s a way we can scale the organization.
But we have no paid staff, we’re brand new. We’re still building our next iteration of our website. These are still very early days. We’re in the first inning here. I think we’re moving along nicely, but you can’t build Rome in a day. And of course as a nonprofit, you can’t take venture funds because there’s no return on investment. When we first announced, all these venture funds were calling us for meetings, which is very exciting. But it wouldn’t have made sense because we have to exist only for the benefit of our members, not for the benefit of shareholders. We weren’t even ready to engage with sponsors until just last week. We sat down with two national sponsors on [Feb. 26] just to start the conversation because we wanted some more infrastructure in place
What does a sponsorship look like?
Like corporate branding on emails, the website, events. Speaking slots at our conferences online or in person. All that stuff.
We literally just started taking meetings. We’ve had sponsors call us for months. But now we’re taking those meetings and we’ll hopefully get some sponsor money. We’re looking to hire an executive director and to start hopefully bringing on paid staff later this year.
Email Jim Dalrymple II
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