In this edition of Person of the Week, Teresa Kinney, CEO of the Miami Association of Realtors, discusses how her organization is addressing the changes coming to the broker commission environment.
How have the members of the Miami Association of Realtors reacted to the changes that are going to be coming to their profession in the wake of NAR settlement?
They’re taking it a lot better now than they did just after March 15, when it was announced. By five o’clock that day, we had all of the information and resources available for them on the website and announced the first of five legal update courses that we were going to provide for them. That started Monday morning at 10:00 a.m., and by the end of the week we had trained, educated, updated 9,000 members in both English and Spanish.
Since then, we have done so many seminars and courses – we have a total of 13,000 participants that have gone through them. And so, things are looking a lot better now than they did shortly after the announcement.
Regarding the courses that you put together, how did you determine what you were going to be teaching and who was teaching them?
We have an amazing chief legal counsel, and she started working on all the content. She did the first of these legal updates on the settlement, on what it means, and the most frequently anticipated questions. She did five of those that week, both English and Spanish. And then we’ve continued on since there.
What’s going to happen when August 17 comes around and the changes go into effect? Do you think that the realtors in your membership are ready to go into this new environment? Or do you think there are going to be some hiccups along the way?
I think they will be ready for that new environment. We have been working consistently – I told you what we did the first week. And we have done dozens of the understanding buyer brokerage agreement classes with 13,000 participants in those classes. They’re learning not only how to do business in what we’re calling the new normal, but they’re getting questions answered during these sessions. That’s one significant difference between now and shortly after the announcement – and the more questions they get answered, the more solutions and options that we can give them.
Nobody likes change, and I’m not saying this is easy, but they’re certainly more comfortable with it and are getting more comfortable all the time. We had a number of our brokers asking us to put on those courses for their companies, so we have come up with our own courses – we have the first four that we have commissioned to be written for us and owned by our association, and we will license them to our brokers at no cost. Now they’re going to be able to not only put these courses on for their own agents, but also customize them to their own company decisions and language and way of doing business.
If we were to come back one year from now and pick up this conversation, where would you see the broker community in terms of dealing with these changes?
We use the pandemic as one of our examples when we’re talking about change and adapting to change. That was a period of time where they thought the real estate business was never going to come back – people couldn’t even leave their homes. And within three days into the pandemic, we were able to have real estate tours – real estate was deemed essential in Miami Dade County, and we started rolling out all of the products and services necessary to show and sell properties virtually. We ended up with our two best years ever in real estate.
I’m not saying it’s an easy change, but it is a change. And what our brokers are telling us is that the biggest discomfort their agents have is having the conversations with buyers and with sellers. And so, we have two new courses that we have written and have presented, and we are making that available to our brokers to license – one is about conversations with buyers and one is on conversations with buyers and sellers.
The brokers will tell us what they want next. Whatever that is, we’ll find the best person to write it and present it and make it available to them.