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In January 2023, the Mainstreet Organization of REALTORS® board of directors decided to take a bold direction.
Our board was concerned about the class-action lawsuits and the U.S. Department of Justice versus organized real estate—and what this unprecedented confluence of events could mean for our brokerage community. We had a nagging feeling that far too many brokers were unaware of the gathering storm.
At Mainstreet, our mission—while it’s been rewritten, rehashed and reworked through many different strategic plans—has always been to help members succeed in real estate, no matter what the external environment looks like.
After the board’s decision at the beginning of 2023, we got to work focusing on what we could control—retooling our education, forms and contracts, and messaging. We shared pertinent National Association of REALTORS® and Illinois REALTORS® updates, and we created a free broker road show, which we rolled out in June 2023, called the Big ReThink.
Going Where the Brokers Are
The Big ReThink featured the latest information on the lawsuits, presented by instructors Lynn Madison and Chris Read. The Big ReThink also included a candid discussion led by Mainstreet’s leadership team, fielding questions from brokers in attendance.
We marketed the Big ReThink exclusively to designated managing brokers, the Illinois license law equivalent to “designated REALTORS®” and the term NAR uses to identify the person in a company responsible for the duties and responsibilities of membership. Designated managing brokers here are typically the broker-owners and office managers. Also in Illinois, there is no agent license, per se. Licensees are either brokers or managing brokers. This can be confusing. For simplicity, I’ll just use the generic terms “brokers” and “agents.”
Because we already had the budget for a broker road show and two of the nation’s top real estate instructors right in our own backyard, we were able to absorb the costs with minimal budget impact. We did incur facility rental, food and beverage, and audiovisual costs along with speakers’ fees. Our broker road show budget was $5,000 per location. There were four locations spread throughout the Mainstreet territory, totaling $20,000. We went a bit over budget because the crowds ended up being so large that we had to spend extra on A/V and food and beverage.
A side note about Mainstreet: Because our territory is so vast—starting in the north at the Wisconsin border and going south all the way to the Indiana border, with the city of Chicago roughly 20 miles to the east—it is important to go where the brokers are. We have broker offices in 285 ZIP codes, and there are 178 miles between our northernmost and southernmost broker offices.
So, we’d already planned for this type of event, held in four different locations—just not the subject matter. That was our pivot. Because the topics were so timely and relevant, we drew out some folks whom we normally don’t see at association events.
The Aftermath
Overall, the feedback was positive. Accounting for the offices represented by the brokers attending our four Big ReThink sessions, we reached roughly 12,000 of our 19,000 members. Most brokers appreciated that their association was trying to get out ahead of the curve on these seismic shifts in the industry so they could begin with their own preparations for change. However, a few expressed concerns that agents would have questions that they weren’t ready to entertain.
Several months later, we followed up with attendees of the Big ReThink broker road show, offering them the ABR course at no charge during November, Designation Awareness Month. Approximately 300 brokers took us up on the offer. We brought down the costs with help from our state association, which is our sponsoring school, and instructor, and we hosted the course in our largest classroom, considering it to be a relevant value-add and reward to our broker community for engaging in their association.
We also offered shorter courses, adapting key concepts from ABR and SRS, or Seller Representative Specialist, offering them along with continuing education credit.
At the same time, we began updating our forms and contracts to address anticipated changes, triggering representation conversations between our members and consumers much earlier in the process than before.
The Metrics
Like many associations, at Mainstreet we track key performance indicators every month and report those to the board in an infographic. Two KPIs that I like to cross reference are number of member phone calls answered, which measures member engagement, and net promoter score, which measures member satisfaction.
Last December, our dashboard showed 12,582 incoming calls from members, with our staff answering 9,445 of those live. Meanwhile, our NPS had taken a precipitous dip from north of 70% all the way down to 38%, with 64% promoters and 26% detractors. This was at a time when 2024 dues were due and the verdict from the Sitzer trial had been out for a few weeks.
For perspective, Mainstreet’s membership size is 18,759. Fielding nearly 9,500 live calls in one month was quite a heavy lift for our team. And judging from our all-time low NPS, members were not happy.
One of my favorite books is Leadership Isn’t for Cowards by Mike Staver. It’s about confronting problems and turning them into opportunities. By this time, we’d taken the position of openly addressing the external-threats landscape with our broker community and communicating everything we could coming out of NAR, along with our own context for Chicagoland. Clearly, we took some hits but believed it was the right approach to take.
Big ReThink Redux
So in December, we did a follow-up session with our brokers called Big ReThink Redux. We held these sessions at our headquarters and at our largest satellite location. They followed the same format as the original Big ReThink broker road show from the previous summer, with a two-hour update from the experts and a Mainstreet leadership team Q&A.
Throughout 2024, we’ve expanded the outreach on these issues to include all member audiences, with events for the Young Professionals Network, global specialists and members specializing in senior services, as well as our virtual Coffee & Conversation series, open to everyone.
Another example is our annual Law Day, renamed “Lawlapalooza.” Although it is broker-centric and mostly attended by brokers, it’s open to all members. This year, Lawlapalooza was packed with nearly 400 attendees (both live and via Zoom). The bulk of the program was centered on the class-action lawsuits, NAR’s proposed settlement, Mainstreet forms updates and the coming change to Illinois real estate license law requiring buyerrepresentation agreements.
Big, Big News—Huge!
NAR announced the proposed settlement on Friday, March 15, on the last day of AE Institute in San Diego. By the following Monday we shot a three-minute video in our studio and released it later that day to Mainstreet REALTORS® announcing the good news. This video had 2,433 views. For the next two weeks, we released follow-up videos with more information for context and clarity. The overall goals for these videos were to acknowledge what had happened, reassure members that it’s good news, and impress upon them the importance of heeding only reputable information sources—their local, state and national associations.
Of course, we followed our own advice, pushing updates from NAR and Illinois REALTORS® via Mainstreet’s social media channels. We also posted select links and documents to the broker-centric section on the Mainstreet website, behind the login, and prominently featured NAR’s competition.realtor and facts.realtor websites as well as NAR handouts.
What’s Next?
For the rest of this year and beyond, we’re committed to this path that we started back in January 2023—to continually provide not only up-to-date information for brokers, but also the context in which events and changes are unfolding, the reasons for these changes and, more importantly, which steps brokers should be making to prepare their agents for a successful future.
After all, helping members succeed— no matter what—is baked into our DNA at Mainstreet. I’m guessing you’re all about it, too.
