Discrimination isn’t born, it’s mandated.

Thank you to the Hot List Subscribers who brought the following Spectator article to our attention: The Realtor’s Woke Dilemma Is Coming, and it’s coming for you

 ARTICLE LINK: https://spectator.org/woke-realtors/
Title: The Realtor’s Woke Dilemma Is Coming, and it’s coming for you.
Author: Scott Mckay

Click it. Bookmark it.
Let’s shred it to pieces. The author of the article, Scott Mckay, is described at bottom of page as “a writer of fiction”. Boy did he stay On-Brand with this bundle of BS.

 The topic under siege is the National Association of Realtors Code of Ethics. The article claims the NAR’s ethics code “punishes Realtors for any hate speech or discrimination, not only on the job, but 24 hours, seven days a week.”

 Look, if your goal is to condone hate speech and discrimination, perhaps a job serving the public isn’t up your alley. As a Realtor I am obligated to not only know the NAR’s Code of Ethics, but I also endure an annual 3-hour class to keep up with their everchanging picadilloes. When someone mischaracterizes that Code of Ethics, such as Scott McKay did in the aforementioned article, I enjoy a certain obligation to counter those blatant lies with Truth. If such paints me as “woke”, so be it.

 The NAR Code of Ethics is found here for reference: https://www.nar.realtor/about-nar/governing-documents/code-of-ethics/2021-code-of-ethics-standards-of-practice

Now let’s play “Whose Lie is it Anyway?”

 LIE: ”punishes Realtors for any hate speech or discrimination, not only on the job, but 24 hours, seven days a week.”

 TRUTH: Article 1, Standard of Practice 1-1: REALTORS®, when acting as principals in a real estate transaction, remain obligated by the duties imposed by the Code of Ethics.

 “When acting as principals in a real estate transaction” seems pretty specific. When – at a specific time. Acting as principals – doing a certain task. In a real estate transaction – during a specific event. This is the first line of the first standard of the first article in the Code of Ethics. The Spectator’s author somehow managed to miss it. Perhaps authors of publicly disseminated information should be held to similar standards regarding honesty.

 LIE: Here is a churchgoing man who might have to surrender his livelihood rather than affirm what he believes is a lie.

 TRUTH: Article 10, Duties to the Public: REALTORS® shall not deny equal professional services to any person for reasons of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity. REALTORS® shall not be parties to any plan or agreement to discriminate against a person or persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

 If this man’s church is telling him who amongst the public at large he is “allowed” to offer professional services to, that’s a church issue. If you choose to serve the public, you choose to serve the entirety of the public, that’s an American issue. The key word is “choose”. As a Realtor I choose to provide a service; the buying and selling of real estate. I choose to provide that service to everybody or nobody, there is no in-between. This means I might interact with a man wearing a skirt, a lady with a swastika carved in her forehead, or even a three-legged vegan. I am providing client’s a service, not hitching my life wagon to my client’s belief system. Please pass the steak, Tripod.

 LIE: It’s one thing for the NAR to hold its agents to a certain standard in the workplace, but by what right do they have the right to tell those agents what they can do and say in the privacy of their own homes, and in their churches on Sunday morning.

 TRUTH: Article 10, Duties to the Public (cont’d: )REALTORS®, in their real estate employment practices, shall not discriminate against any person or persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

 “In their real estate employment practices” defines when these ethics apply. I reference Article 10 here because the author referenced Article 10 in his piece, as if he’d actually read Article 10. Nowhere does the Code of Ethics demand to be applied outside of the professional sphere. Throughout the Code of Ethics we find that distinction repeated often:

“The duties imposed by the Code of Ethics encompass all real estate-related activities”
“When acting as listing brokers”
“When involved in the sale or lease of a residence”
“REALTORS®, in their real estate employment practices…

And this doozy:
“any duty imposed exclusively on agents by law or regulation shall not be imposed by this Code of Ethics on REALTORS® acting in non-agency capacities”

 Those words are torn straight from Standard of Practice 1-2. It’s the second item the Code of Ethics mentions. Whether that line was missed intentionally or negligently is the fault of the author, and the author’s intentions.

 OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

As a professional Realtor I work with the Public. The Public is a herd of humanity that arrives in a variety of sizes and flavors. I am not required to love them all. I am required to serve them all. I happen to love them all anyhow, every person is a story I yearn to learn, but that’s just me acting outside of my ethical obligations. You can’t force feed tolerance or acceptance. You can’t erase divisions by proclamation. You, as a human, can choose to treat every soul you encounter as an opportunity to learn and grow, or you can be an asshole. It’s your choice.

 It’s your choice to keep your promises, to tell the truth, listen to your parents, do your best, laugh at yourself, use kind words, hug your family, share your experiences, say Please and Thank You, and tip more than 15%. YOUR CHOICE. The condition you reach this life’s finish line in will be the sum of those choices. Don’t screw it up.

 The National Association Situation

As a Realtor and a longtime veteran of the Real Estate Industry, my love for the National Association of Realtors was last spotted siding a milk carton. Experience erodes. Employment as a Real Estate Agent requires me to be a member of the NAR. Over the years I’ve found the NAR to be a progressively lazy institution that occupies its time somnambulantly, like a Park Ranger issuing littering tickets for discarded cigarette butts while the forest burns around them. Today, right now, in our world, we have publicly-traded corporations posing as NAR licensed Real Estate Brokerages. Those Manhattan monsters have spent 2021 swallowing more Arizona properties than the housing market has available to sell, manipulating prices and inventory, right underneath the turned-up noses of the NAR and SEC. No actions taken whatsoever. I could write a book about the unethical activities the NAR seemingly endorses by way of indolence. I do not like them, Stan I am.

But dishonesty is worse. I find myself a strange bedfellow defending an NAR I don’t particularly care for. However, The Spectator’s “Realtor’s Woke Dilemma” article is such a dishonest smear, it requires rebuttal and should be removed and retracted. Its author should be sentenced to actually read the Code of Ethics he so dismissively ignored the first go round…God forbid he adopt some of these ethics himself.

Nar Code of Ethics Front page: “While the Code of Ethics establishes obligations that may be higher than those mandated by law, in any instance where the Code of Ethics and the law conflict, the obligations of the law must take precedence.”

Politics has no place in Real Estate. Real Estate has no place in Politics.
Fortunately, racist clowns are endorsed, employed, and published by only one of those affiliations.