There is a battle unfolding in residential real estate right now, and if you think it’s just a dispute between competing brokerages, you’re missing the bigger picture.
What’s at stake is who gets access to the American dream of homeownership, and who gets left out.
The HousingWire opinion piece, authored by Gary Acosta, CEO and co-founder of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, brings together five influential organizations: the League of United Latin American Citizens, NAHREP, National Association of Real Estate Brokers, National Fair Housing Alliance, and UnidosUS.
These organizations represent important voices in the fight for civil rights, fair housing, and greater access to homeownership. And they’re raising an alarm that the entire residential real estate industry should take seriously.
.Consider the numbers cited in the article:
- Approximately 90% of home sellers in America are white.
- First-time homebuyers are roughly three times more likely to come from communities of color than the owners of the homes they’re purchasing.
- The average homeowner has 43 times the net worth of the average renter.
Now consider what happens when real estate companies begin moving available homes out of the shared marketplace and into private networks accessible primarily through their own agents and relationships.
Who gets to see those homes? More importantly, who doesn’t?
For all the talk about innovation and seller choice, there has been remarkably little discussion about the consequences for buyers, particularly those who are already struggling to enter an increasingly unaffordable housing market.
The most glaring oversight in the seller choice argument is that sellers have always had the ability to market their homes discreetly when circumstances warrant it. That isn’t new, and it isn’t what’s being challenged.
What’s changing is the effort to make restricted exposure and hiding metrics like days on market a mainstream business model, one that potentially benefits the brokerage controlling the inventory at the expense of broader market access.
Some of the biggest players in the industry are spending enormous time and resources fighting over who controls listings when it should be fighting to make homeownership more accessible.
Housing discrimination isn’t ancient history. Neither is the struggle to build generational wealth through homeownership. We should be supporting a less restrictive path to homeownership, not creating new hardships under the banner of innovation.
This has never been simply a conversation about real estate marketing strategies. It’s about transparency, competition, equal opportunity, and the fundamental responsibility our industry has to the public.
The housing market should not become a collection of private clubs where access depends on who you know or which brokerage represents you. You shouldn’t have to engage a real estate agent just to see what inventory is available – that makes the whole process more cumbersome and less fair for everyone involved, including the agents.
Everyone, whether they’re buying a home, selling one, working in real estate, or shaping housing policy, needs to understand what’s happening.
Once access to housing becomes a competitive advantage controlled by a handful of corporations, the consequences will extend far beyond our industry and the damage will be very difficult to walk back.
This is why Brown Harris Stevens has been so vocal about the importance of transparency and fair markets in real estate. From the beginning, we’ve said this issue is bigger than any one brokerage or portal. It’s time for consumers, the industry, and politicians to pay attention and take action.
Leave a Reply