The Prospect Before ORE in BC

The real estate industry has increased in complexity along with the world around it. The good work done by regional Real Estate Boards and the British Columbia Real Estate Association has seen the sector leverage digital communication and technology, allowing us to become more proactive and relevant in responding to our members’ needs – both actual and perceived.

With such progress, it’s relatively easy to disregard that in our pursuit to be and to do more, we regularly see duplications and redundancies in our labours which can be wasteful, even harmful. Without deliberate intention, we mirror, compete, and obscure one another’s initiatives, methods, messages, and services in ways that blur the lines between regional, provincial, and national agendas.

Perhaps the time has come to right-size Board activities and leadership job descriptions.

Simply stated, we need to reverse engineer our regional boards, letting national and provincial associations and regulator do what they do best for members while allowing regional boards to focus on what we do well for members. This requires our leaders to review the capabilities of participants in organized real estate (ORE) and to strike a deliberate arrangement to optimize system resources with a view to sunsetting duplicate activities that consume volunteer, leadership, and staff time. While Boards play a key role in the member experience, they can be resource-intensive, challenging to manage, and disturbingly static. The Association and Boards represent strong assets – but only if they can address the most fundamental questions:

• How do we ensure value and consequence across our network without over-taxing our members, volunteers, and staff?
• Does our regional model support and accentuate our mission and goals?
• What standards are required to ensure consistent quality and member experience?
• How do we know if the whole of the system delivers member value?
• What services can be streamlined, harmonized, shared?

We already know or can reasonably hypothesize the answer to most of these. The deeper question might be, what can we do about it? We debate these issues, even make important tweaks and refinements, but we still miss the mark in achieving efficiency or aligning member performance and experience. Concurrently, we allocate modest time and resources to insulating the profession from institutional rivalry.

One opportunity lies in moving from a model of collaboration to one of implementation. The time is upon the profession to establish an authoritative provincial consortium, where decision-making representation from each of the Boards and the Association strategize a way forward. With dedicated intent to harmonize the homogenous elements of the ORE ecosystem (such as provincial Multiple Listing Service®, or pan-BC member compliance for example), the goal ought to be establishing delegated centres of excellence that streamline provincial practices, shrink duplication, and galvanize the profession’s competitive advantage.

If the profession and its stewards fail to act, we can trust that external factors will continue to rationalize the profession for us.