If you follow the news, you may think of the National Association of Realtors as being a hotbed of sex crimes, expense-account embezzlement scams and uncanny legal ineptitude. But before all that, the NAR is and has been since its inception one of America’s best enemies of the everyday human liberty this country was founded to protect.
The NAR is the reason not just for the real estate broker’s license but for every occupational license. Until the NAR, you did not have to beg permission from the state to earn a living.
That much is awful, but blame the state and its courts. But by making itself the source of the legislation, the NAR has made war on the rights of private property owners since it began. There is good reason to hate every bit of the progressive political movement in the early Twentieth Century, and the NAR had its greasy fingers in everything – and in every anti-economic crime since then.
Closer to home, where my own ox is gored, brokers in Phoenix are just that close to being rid of the NAR. Since 1994, it has been completely NAR-rules-complaint for local associations and MLS systems to offer MLS-only access to brokers who wanted it. Who did? New-home builders, mostly, who wanted to list into the MLS but not shop into it.
I looked into this in 2020, when the NAR launched its speech code – they snuffed a broker with it last month – but the cost was prohibitive then and the forms used in Arizona are published by the AAR – that is to say, by the NAR.
So since 1994, while it has been possible for metro-Phoenix residential resale brokers to break free of the NAR while retaining the MLS, it has not been practical. By way of the AAR forms, the NAR was able to use MLS-access as golden handcuffs on residential real estate brokers.
That would be forced association leading necessarily to forced speech, all in pursuit of bright-line, bald-faced restraint of trade. You know, the good old American way…
Enter the Phoenix Association of Realtors, which, putting two and two together, realized that it could make MLS-only access available to brokers who want it, supporting them with its own new set of transaction documents, which it calls MLSChoice. I am never an early adopter of anything, but I hate, hate, hate the NAR, so I am among the first cadre of MLSChoice brokers.
I list and I lease, so losing the AAR forms is not the end of the world for me – and the MLSChoice documents are better, anyway – better as to statute and case law and better with all of the ticky-tack addenda needed to post a listing or to make an offer. MLSChoice is a better standard of care for sellers, buyers and their brokers from day one, likely to result in dramatically fewer conflicts. From a fiduciary standpoint, that seems kind of important, doncha’ think?
In any case, waking up with a hangover from yet another sex crime on the expense account, the NAR has suddenly realized that if brokers can escape its clutches… they will…
So very late in the process – MLSChoice starts January 1st – the NAR decided to pick a fight. This is news, and plausibly you already know as much about it as you want to. But the beef boils down to this: MLS-only access to ARMLS has been NAR-rules-compliant since 1994. Making that option attractive to residential resale brokers is anathema to the NAR simply because the NAR is odious to a significant portion of its coerced membership. Take away the coercion and you take out the NAR.
And good riddance. Crime is the opposite of commerce. There is nothing of peaceful social intercourse that is improved by coercion, compulsion or de facto price controls. The NAR is odious to its members and to all Americans because it is an enemy to liberty as such. It cannot go to hell fast enough.
