What A Visit To Nar Revealed About Leadership Change

I’ll be honest with you — I’m not always the most charitable voice when it comes to the National Association of Realtors. Those of you who follow me know I say what’s on my mind, and for a while, my mind hasn’t been particularly generous toward NAR leadership. So, when I received an invitation to visit their headquarters in Chicago and meet with CEO Nykia Wright and several department heads, I was surprised they asked. And I went anyway.

What I experienced there changed something in me — not naively, not permanently beyond scrutiny, but meaningfully. I want to share what I learned, because I think a lot of us in this industry are making assessments from a very long distance.

The view from a mile away

Here’s the problem with how most of us evaluate NAR: we’re judging a house we’ve never walked into. We’re standing a mile away, squinting through a telescope, wearing sunglasses and we think we’ve got the full picture. We don’t.

I got to walk inside the house, and what I saw was different from what I expected.

The first thing I did when I arrived was find someone who wasn’t in the room with the executives. I sought out a regular employee — someone who described himself as being about 20 rungs down the organizational ladder. Someone with no title to protect, no agenda to push, no reason to sell me on anything.

I asked him what it was like to work there now, under new leadership.

He told me that under the previous CEO, watching someone in charge make significantly more money while working significantly less created real animosity throughout the building. Then, he told me about Nykia Wright. He said: “When I come in early, she’s already there. If I leave late, she’s leaving after me. She is the hardest-working person I’ve experienced here. It’s a real joy to work in this place now.”

That’s not a press release. That’s a guy 20 rungs down the ladder telling you what it actually feels like inside the building. And those kinds of testimonials speak louder than any official statement ever could.

The cruise ship problem

Here’s something I think we forget when we get frustrated with large organizations: turning a ship takes time.

When a cruise ship needs to change direction, the captain doesn’t just spin the wheel and expect an instant pivot. That decision has to be made hours before the actual turn happens. The bigger the vessel, the longer the lead time. NAR is one of the largest trade associations in the country, in any industry. This is not a speedboat. It is an ocean liner.

That doesn’t excuse the mistakes of the past — and there have been real ones. But it does mean that expecting overnight transformation isn’t realistic, and judging the current leadership by the sins of the previous administration isn’t fair. We need to give the ship time to turn.

What I saw in Chicago convinced me the wheel has been turned. Whether the ship ends up where we need it to go depends not just on leadership, but on all of us.

What you don’t know about your membership

Here’s something that surprised me. Most of us think of our NAR membership primarily as access to the MLS. That’s not nothing — but it’s a fraction of what’s actually happening on our behalf behind the scenes. During my visit, I learned about accomplishments and advocacy efforts I simply wasn’t aware of. Protections fought for. Legislation influenced. Industry interests defended. Work done quietly, without fanfare, that directly benefits your business and your clients.

And here’s where NAR still has real work to do: members are drowning in email, and somewhere between the inbox and the delete button, the meaningful wins are getting lost. It’s not enough to do good work behind the scenes — you have to break through the noise and actually reach your members with that message. I raised this directly with leadership, and to their credit, they heard it. Getting the right information to the right people, in a way that actually lands, has to be a priority going forward.

Accountability from a place of commitment

I want to be clear about something. Walking into that building and coming away hopeful doesn’t mean I’m going soft. I will still call out what I see — for example, the ridiculously high salaries amounting to over a million dollars paid to elected “volunteers” over a four-year period, or the Zillow deal that appears designed to work against the very agents NAR is supposed to represent. I will still hold leadership to a high standard. That’s not changing.

But there’s a difference between accountability rooted in a genuine desire to make things better, and criticism rooted in wanting to be right about a negative opinion. One of those serves the industry. The other just makes noise.

Human beings are flawed. You are flawed. God knows I am flawed. Being a human being is a messy thing — and NAR is made up of human beings. The organization has made mistakes, and some of those mistakes were serious. But the measure of an institution isn’t whether it stumbles — it’s whether it gets back up, faces what went wrong, and does the hard work of rebuilding trust. From what I saw in Chicago, that work is underway.

So, here’s my challenge to all of us: Take the sunglasses off. Put down the assumptions. Walk inside the house if you get the chance — or at least acknowledge that the view from a mile away isn’t the whole story.

Our industry is worth fighting for. Our clients deserve an association that fights for them. And right now, for the first time in a while, I believe that fight is being waged with integrity.

Darryl Davis, CSP, is a nationally recognized real estate speaker, coach, and author of three McGraw-Hill books. He has trained over 600,000 real estate professionals worldwide and leads the POWER AGENT® Coaching Program. Learn more at darrylspeaks.com.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.

To contact the editor responsible for this piece: tracey@hwmedia.com