- Originally published at Inman News - Andrea V. Brambila
Each month, the trade group publicly reports the size of its ranks and other data on its official website. But as recently as this month, state-by-state and national data is nowhere to be found.
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Decades of membership data has been scrubbed from the National Association of Realtors’ website and is no longer available either to members or the public, though the trade group says the data will be available to members again at some point in the future.
Until at least March, NAR had posted monthly counts of its ranks by state and nationwide for years on its website, along with annual membership counts by state dating back to at least 1970 and national counts back to 1908. The data was previously available here, but now redirects to a generic web page on Realtor membership.
“NAR will continue to report its membership numbers directly to our members,” NAR spokesperson Mantill Williams told Inman in a statement. “We are recalibrating how those reports are produced to keep our members informed and retain our focus on doing what is most important to them – ensuring a smooth transition with the upcoming rule changes and preparing Realtors for continued success and growth.”
NAR did not respond to questions asking why the data was removed from the website, is not currently available to members, and will no longer be available to the public at all. “Any suggestion that our members will not have visibility into membership data is inaccurate,” Williams added.
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“This is why members get so ticked off with the NAR,” Inman contributor Teresa Boardman, broker-owner of Boardman Realty, told Inman. She has been a NAR member more than 22 years.
On Tuesday, Boardman saw that the monthly reports, which she uses for her real estate blog, were gone from the site.
“Instead of coming up with a conspiracy theory as to why the numbers are gone, I decided that maybe it was a mistake or if not, I could just ask what happened to the numbers,” Boardman said.
She contacted NAR and asked where she could get membership data now that the numbers were no longer on the site. She was told “I’m sorry, but the Monthly Membership Report is no longer available on nar.realtor. Membership at NAR still stands at 1.5 million.” Boardman provided Inman with copies of the email thread between herself and NAR.
“The one-sentence response is a great example of the kind of communication that causes distrust in the organization,” Boardman said.
“Now I am sure there is a reason why the numbers are no longer being published on the site. NAR is trying to hide something.”
“My best guess is that membership is declining so rapidly they can’t keep track,” Boardman added.
NAR did not respond to Boardman’s inquiries as to why the data was removed or where she could access it, except to say it was no longer available.
The data’s disappearance comes as NAR’s membership has been steadily declining in recent months in the wake of scandals, proliferating antitrust commission lawsuits, market conditions, and competition from a new trade group, American Real Estate Association (A.R.E.A.).
In February, NAR’s enrollment dipped below 1.5 million members for the first time since May 2021, the fourth-consecutive monthly decline. In 2023, NAR membership fell on an annual basis for the first time since 2012.
In a February presentation, NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun predicted further membership declines at a local, state and national level over the next 24 months, “given the reduction in business opportunities over the past two years” and “the lag effects of past housing cycles.”
NAR is not the only industry player who has chosen to keep data it normally publishes from the public. Last month, real estate consulting firm T3 Sixty announced it would not publish its 2024 ranking of the U.S.’s 1,000 largest brokerages, dubbed the Mega 1000 list. The company also said it would not publish its list of the “nation’s largest real estate enterprises, franchise brands and franchises.”
Jack Miller, the firm’s president and CEO, said the decision was “due to current and pending lawsuits, and at the request of numerous privately owned brokerage companies involved in those lawsuits” who asked to be excluded from the rankings after NAR’s proposed settlement of the suits left some 90 large brokerages out of the deal based on their transaction volume as recorded in T3 Sixty’s Almanac.
