Welcome, everyone, to Midday Magazine for this April 9, 2024.
Have your host, James J. Mailoff here.
We're welcoming in the studio, our friend, David Farnborough, and broker with Colwell
Banker, CEO, realtors, and it's time for Let's Talk Real Estate.
Good to see you, David.
How have you been?
I am very well.
Thank you, James.
Always good to be here.
Good to see you too.
Appreciate the time, as always, and David, we're going to get into a couple of different
things today.
I think you had a great spot to, and this is where I'd like to start, April is National
Fair Housing Month.
Can we get into the discussion of what fair housing is, and a little bit more about
that topic?
Yes.
We often hear people talk about it, and sometimes the way that we talk about it, sometimes
we realtors don't really give much nuance or expression to what's going on with fair
housing, and there is a lot of work still being done.
We typically would hear people talk about things like the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
1968 was a really turbulent year in America for a number of reasons.
We had a couple of very significant assassinations, and race was very much at the top of people's
minds.
And the Fair Housing Act made some important steps to end discrimination.
But it didn't end discrimination, and it's wrong for us to sit back in our chairs and
say, well, we've sorted this, this is a problem that we've solved.
And I think sometimes we looked it that way, which is wrong.
I remember a number of friends of mine when the NFL and some sport, a lot of the sports
leagues started having the end racism in the end zone and these things, and like, well,
OK, we solved racism.
You know, I mean, no, no, no, we didn't.
We just brought some attention to it and everything, a bill passed like that or some of the other
things that have happened in the decade since we're getting it better, we're making it
better, but there's still work to be done.
Yeah.
And we continue to make steps.
I mean, there are a series of progressive steps that were made.
So from 1964, we had the Civil Rights Act, 1968, the Fair Housing Act, 1988, the Fair Housing
Amendment Act, all these things gradually make things better.
And there are also things that have been done within our own state, Wisconsin, that just
expand people's rights and put in place penalties for people who discriminate unfairly.
One thing that we've seen is the terms of discrimination being changed.
So with those landmark pieces of legislation, it was generally racially based, but we've
seen those things expanded now to include things like religion, national origin, gender,
and now things like sexuality and gender identity.
But not all of the things that we might think are covered are covered by this, and not
all of the legislation is effective.
So when it comes to that part of things, I keep wanting to call you JR, I'm so sorry,
David.
I'm honest.
Nice.
And when it comes to that, that part seems like more of a personal responsibility kind
of thing on people, on real estate industries, brokers.
There's only so much that government can do.
It's a joint effort, really.
It has to be all of us in the country.
I think if you were to talk to most people in Wisconsin, in Wisconsin Rapids and the
surrounding area, they would say that they wouldn't want to be a part of any unfair
discrimination.
They would want to treat everyone fairly.
But sometimes we'll make mistakes, and we make assumptions based on what people look
like, or what their relationship status might be.
And what we try and do as realtors is we try and look past those things.
We, as a profession, have made a really big effort to try to eliminate unconscious bias,
but we can't always help it, because it's unconscious.
So much of that is organic, so much of it is subconscious, and you know, there's a lot
of talk nowadays about representation and getting things better about that.
And I think we've come a long way with it.
But it's not just an entertainment, we need that.
We needed in other industries as well, for as to the bills that David talked about.
We didn't create those for nothing.
There was a long time, a lot of difficulty in this for certain groups, for certain people
to be able to own a home, and to be able to own a home in a certain neighborhood, a lot
of these factors.
So this representation that we're seeing more and more of going on, it's happening in
other industries as well, including in real estate, where, hey, you know, maybe 20 years
ago, it may have been hard for this person with this particular family to find a home in
this nice neighborhood.
It's not the case anymore.
Things are getting much better when it comes to that, it seems like.
You're absolutely right.
And representation is something that we look at within the profession.
One of the committees I serve on is the Wisconsin Realtors Association DEI Committee.
And what we try to do is, it's not so much one of these quota systems where we say, oh,
we must have a certain percentage of black agents or a certain percentage of women and
men.
It's more like we like to make sure that we put out the message that we want people from
every background to consider real estate as a career.
And this can often help homeowners.
Now I'm not saying that if you're Hispanic, you need Hispanic agent, but it can be helpful
if you have somebody who speaks the same language that you have as your first language.
I hadn't thought about this.
So for me, what I was thinking is just the kind of similarity between representation and
a lot of entertainment and those things nowadays and with where we're going with this and
the housing industry and having more, but I hadn't thought of agents in the representation
with that.
And I think that's a really good point, a really cool thing to bring up, David.
And it's great to hear that that is existing, that that's going on.
You're so right about that.
I can get a home from anybody, but it does help, especially on a language barrier of case.
But just in a regular case, you sell homes to people from this neck of the woods oftentimes.
You'll feel more comfortable talking to somebody who knows this area.
It just adds up.
It's not to say that you can't buy a home from somebody out of state or out of town or
something, but a lot of this makes sense.
I see where you're going with that and where the industry is going with that.
It does.
And this is an area where we're trying to make things better.
But there's still room for improvement in a lot of ways.
There are a small amount of people out there who are still practicing overtly racist things.
And unfortunately, we can't just say this is happening somewhere else.
This is happening in New Jersey.
We've got to look at it here.
We've got to be critical of ourselves and see where we're making mistakes.
I can give you a couple of examples of that which people might not think of.
One of my clients, this is a couple of years ago, was buying a home and we were putting
in offers and they were rejected.
The offers were asking price or higher.
And I did wonder if it was because the names of my clients in the offers were very obviously
mung names.
And I wondered whether maybe the seller didn't want to sell to a person of mung origin, which
is very unfortunate.
But the difficulty you have with that is, well, how can I prove that that's the reason
the offer was rejected?
So you can't just call a seller's realtor and say, hey, is your client a racist?
There is a way to settle this.
And I've actually been working with an organization in Washington, D.C., which deals with potential
ideas to make housing even fairer.
And my suggestion is that when we put offers in on houses, we don't actually use the names
of our buyers.
We have a code for each buyer.
So this buyer is by a B-12 or by a C-33.
So the seller never sees the name.
So they don't know whether they've got a different national origin.
They don't know whether they're Jewish.
They don't know whether it's two men buying together because those things really don't
matter.
Doesn't matter a second.
All they need to know is the price they're offering and the conditions of the offer.
I love this.
Wow.
That's a great idea.
That is really impactful.
Talk about making a real change in this industry in a real direction forward.
Like going, you have a home that you're trying to sell.
You want to get a certain price for it.
You get that price.
That should be the end of really of your concerns about this and everything.
Getting more and more, this is only going to help our communities more.
This is only going to help around the country, something like this would.
It reminds me a little bit of seatbelt laws in a way.
You may not want to wear a seatbelt, but it's for your own good, and we're looking out
for you here.
You may not want to stick to those old tendencies of yours and everything, but trust us,
this is going to sell your home better, and here, sure enough, it probably will.
It would.
That's right.
You see, a lot of people may think that we're just looking out for ourselves as real
filters, but we do have high ethical standards that we sign up for when we become real
tears.
One of those is that we're always trying to look out for our clients, not for us.
This, I think, if we were to anonymise offers, it would make things better for both buyers
and sellers, because sellers would be able to get probably a better price, potentially,
and buyers wouldn't face that potential barrier of someone discriminating on the basis of
their name.
I've learned a lot of things from J.R. over the years, and one of the main things
of first things I really learned from him is how much the real estate industry is a reputation
business, and it is so vital for you, and other realtors out there, to do right by your
clients.
You live in the neighbourhoods with these people.
You live in the same zip code with a lot of these people.
It only makes sense that you would help people in that sense, to buy good homes, to have
a good deal on their home or any of these things, these factors.
When it comes to that, as a community, we see, we see co-op anchor signs everywhere.
We see the name all those places.
We know that is a trusted source.
Other real estate industries, you don't see as much of that, because the reputation ain't
what it used to be, because you burned bridges.
That catches up with you, especially in a medium-sized town like this.
There's a reason co-op has been around as long as it has, and has the reputation it does,
because it does right by its people.
It isn't just about a bottom line.
It's about getting you in the right home or selling your home for the right price.
That's right.
We have a few agents in town that have been around for decades, and they wouldn't do
that if they cheated people, or if they provided bad service.
It is a reputation-based industry, and it's one of those situations where if I'm doing
the best thing for my client, I'm also doing the best thing for my business.
Now, it may be that I'm going to say to my buyer, look, this house isn't worth what
the seller is asking for it.
I may lose myself a sale and lose myself a commission, but I've gained the trust of
my buyer, and that buyer will always come to me, and they will tell their friends to come
to me, because they know I'm honest, it wasn't just after that commission.
Your future self is awfully thankful for you doing that.
You may not make a sale today, but the future you will.
This is all of what we're talking about here with the reputation and treating your community
with respect, and also trying to benefit your business.
You can do both.
Was there anything else you wanted to touch on with the National Fair Housing Month, David?
Yeah, the only other thing I wanted to mention was disability, because I think we've been
becoming more conscious of disabled people's rights in the past 20 and 30 years, and at
this stage, we've got the ADA act in place.
People didn't change their attitudes and their behaviours when that came in, and now people
are starting to think, oh, well, maybe we ought to try and accommodate those.
This is something that's very close to my heart.
I grew up with a sister who was profoundly deaf, and it was always, we were very careful
in our family to always include her in everything we did.
We never had her sitting in a different part of the house on her own.
She was always a full part of our household, and that's one reason I do enjoy representing
deaf or partially hearing people, because I do know how to speak to them.
I don't speak ASL.
I learned a different type of sign language in the UK, but I do know how I can speak slowly
and clearly to someone who can lip-read, and I know that there's nothing wrong with
deaf people's brains.
They understand everything that everyone else does, and I can still hold a conversation
with them, and if there is difficulty with speech and lip-reading, then I can write
down on a piece of paper.
I think this is an area where we have to do our best as realtors to try and accommodate
people's disabilities.
I just gave deafness as an example, but there are other things where we could be more mindful
and just try and give that helping hand.
As we're getting better and better about these things, it's all a thing that we need
to give each other grace on and learn through and get better about, and we can do that together.
I really appreciate you sharing that, David.
Thank you very much for sharing that story.
We're speaking with David Farmerle from Coal Baker See Are Really Tresnal, let's talk real
estate.
David, one of the things that we wanted to get into was the NRA case settlement, and some
of the misinformation that's around with that.
Yes, and this is always humorous to me because people call it the NRA, and that's the National
Rifle Association.
Yeah, why did they do that?
Yeah, I don't know why I did that.
They're the whole other thing.
That's all other things.
It's easily done because we do have the WRA, which is the Wisconsin Realtor Association,
but when they came to name the National Association of Realtors, they moved the acronym around
a little, so it's the NAR.
What this is, it's a legal case which has recently been settled by some very high-profile
law firms, and there's a group of plaintiffs, the individuals bringing the case, and those
people were house sellers out of our state in places like New York State and others, and
the defendants were the National Association of Realtors and several large real estate companies,
which included reality, which is the parent company for Colbolt Banker, but also all the
other big ones, so Remax, First Weber, and various others.
The case settled, sorry, the case was brought on the basis that these home sellers were
saying that the National Association of Realtors and these real estate brokerages had unfairly
fixed prices and had not done their due diligence for the sellers.
They ought to have been trying to give a better deal to the sellers.
This has been rumbling on for years.
National Association of Realtors wanted to settle it.
They wanted to take away that sort of damage that had been hanging over us, and it was
a big settlement, so the first thing was financial.
They agreed to pay $418 million over four years, which is actually on a year-by-year basis.
It's a third of the NAR's annual revenue, so really big for our industry.
The second thing was they agreed, the NAR agreed that from, I think it's July of this
year, we would no longer put a figure in property listings for the amount of commission that
we'd be paid to a buyer's realtor, and that's something that had been done for decades.
That doesn't mean that the buyer's realtor doesn't get commission.
It just means that it's not stated explicitly in the property listings.
The third thing, which is actually something that I welcome, is that all buyers, this
is home buyers, it doesn't affect commercial property, must have written representation
agreements.
Now, all this sounds a little bit dry and legal.
The upshot, if it is, that in the past, people would sometimes have gone in as a home
buyer, and they would have had no written agreement with the realtor who was writing
the offer for them, and it may be that that realtor was, in fact, representing the seller,
and sometimes, we as realtor didn't do a good job of explaining that to the buyer.
Now, all buyers going in will have to have a written representation agreement.
It feels like a lot of this is really well done because it doesn't just protect buyers
and sellers of these homes, it protects agents as well.
Everybody on the same page kind of thing, it seems like to me.
Well, this particular part of the decision, sorry, it wasn't a decision, it was a settlement,
settlement.
I can't think of it either.
It was a settlement, so nothing was agreed in court, it was all settled outside court.
This part of the settlement is something that the National Association of Realtors had
actually been advocating for a number of years.
They'd actually been saying, yes, let's always have buyers agency agreements, and I, as
a realtor, almost always have a buyer agency agreement.
There will be one time in a hundred where a buyer won't want that, and there'll be some
circumstances where the buyer will say, well, maybe I'm only going to buy a house in Wisconsin
Rapids if this office accepted, and otherwise I'm going to be looking in the Green Bay area
and then I'll use a different agent.
Now, we can actually work that into the agreement, so we can actually make a buyer's agreement
reflect those terms.
So that won't, now, although we will have to have the agreement, we can still incorporate
those terms, so it won't really harm any housewife.
It seems to keep everything on the up and up, you know, it adds a little less gray area
maybe to some things as well.
I think that's right, written agreement is always good, because then everybody knows
what they've entered into.
If it's properly explained, and sometimes I am aware that sometimes papers are thrust
in front of someone with a pen, and they're told to sign them, I would expect that the
majority of realtors do a good job and tell their clients, this is what this means, and
this is what you're signing.
David, I always appreciate the time and the conversation with you, and what you and
the team at Coal Bank are due for our community, we really do appreciate it.
If people have follow questions, one of them more about some what we talked about today,
how can they reach you, how can they get a hold of your team?
Well, the best way to reach me personally is by texting me on 718-323-8594.
I will respond to texts far quicker than anything.
I had someone texting me last night, actually, interestingly, I'm not going to give her
name, but she's a prospective disabled client who wanted me to represent her because she
knows that I have strong beliefs.
She actually texted me about LNBM and said, hey David, is it possible for someone like
me to get a mortgage, and I've messaged her back, yep, I'll talk to you about it in
the morning.
Good on you, that's cool, that's good to hear.
Please reach out to David, you can find out more at CoalBaker.com, CoalBaker.com.
We will talk again next month, thanks for the time, David.
Thank you to James.
We'll be back with more Midday Magazine tomorrow right here at WFHR, we are locally grown
radio.
