Mark your calendars for the ultimate real estate experiences with Inman’s upcoming events! Dive into the future at Connect Miami, immerse in luxury at Luxury Connect, and converge with industry leaders at Inman Connect Las Vegas. Discover more and join the industry’s best at inman.com/events.
Each week on The Download, Inman’s Christy Murdock takes a deeper look at the top-read stories of the week to give you what you’ll need to meet Monday head-on. This week: At Inman Connect New York, The Agency founder unveiled his plan for a rival organization to take on NAR. Is there any chance it’ll work?
The last year has been a brutal one for the National Association of Realtors. From scandal to lawsuits (and ever-more lawsuits), the once-Teflon organization is undergoing a long, cascading fall from grace.
From the ICNY stage and in the pages of Inman, it seems that everyone is thinking about the impact of NAR’s struggle and looking at what it means for their individual businesses (and for the industry at large). This week, two prominent NAR critics laid out a tentative roadmap that may indicate even more stress on the already-strained trade group.
“Built by Realtors, for Realtors,” is the way The Agency founder Mauricio Umansky somewhat ironically characterized The American Real Estate Association, or AREA, the new organization he’s launching with Compass’ Jason Haber as an alternative to the National Association of Realtors.
Advance word about the organization leaked Monday in The New York Times, but Wednesday’s Inman Connect New York session offered Umansky a platform from which to more thoroughly make his case that NAR is no longer cutting it — and that the time is right for a replacement.
Umansky offered few details about how exactly his and Haber’s AREA might look, or how it might specifically solve any of NAR’s shortcomings, indicating that the new organization might be less a replacement for NAR than a way to add…