Q: I keep hearing real estate agents say buyers and sellers want more “transparency.” But when I read the news, it seems like the industry keeps fighting transparency every time someone actually proposes it. Which is true?
A: Both are true, and that tension is exactly what played out at NAR’s midyear meetings in Washington last week, in a debate worth every consumer’s attention.
A committee chair, B.J. Harris, proposed requiring agents to disclose when they lack relevant knowledge – say, about a property type or neighborhood – before taking on a client there. Her reasoning was simple: it would “reinforce” the existing “ethical duty to protect and promote the interests of clients,” something she called “something we all should be doing anyway.”
A director from Florida pushed back hard. “We do not need to create ‘ahas’ or ‘gotchas’ in the Code of Ethics,” she said. “The moment that we disclose [that lack of knowledge] you’ve lost that trust with the consumer for the rest of your relationship with them.” After nearly an hour of debate, the proposal was sent back to committee rather than adopted.
I want to take a side here: Harris is right, and the Florida director has it backwards. Telling a client upfront “I haven’t worked this neighborhood before, but here’s how I’ll get up to speed” doesn’t destroy trust – it builds it. What destroys trust is the client finding out later, after a bad outcome, that their agent was guessing the whole time. Consumers don’t expect an agent to know everything. They expect honesty about its absence. I know this from my own experience as an agent. When a customer asked me a question I did not know the answer to, I told them I didn’t know, but I would find the answer and get back to them.
This isn’t an isolated incident. Three recent, well-documented examples show the same pattern: an industry instinct to protect insiders’ comfort over consumer clarity.
- The Clear Cooperation Policy, meant to stop hidden “pocket listings” and force every home onto the open market within a day, instead pushed listings further underground into private networks invisible to the public — the opposite of its stated goal.
- The Sitzer-Burnett antitrust verdict found that NAR and major brokerages had conspired to inflate commissions, costing a Missouri jury’s lead plaintiff 40 percent of her sale proceeds in fees she was never told were negotiable. NAR paid $418 million to settle, while insisting throughout that its old rules were “pro-consumer.”
- And dual agency — an agent secretly representing both sides of a deal — remains legal in most states despite (see link) courts calling undisclosed versions of it “fraudulent conduct.”
In each case, the industry’s defenders used the word “transparency” while opposing the specific reform that would have delivered it. That’s the pattern Harris ran into.
Here’s what I believe: Agents who adopt Harris’s instinct voluntarily – disclosing gaps, weaknesses, and limits before a client discovers them the hard way – will out-compete the agents who hide behind “trust me.” Consumers today have Google, Zillow, and county records at their fingertips. They can verify almost anything. An agent’s only renewable asset left is candor, freely given before it’s demanded.
The Code of Ethics didn’t reject Harris’s idea forever. It sent it back for more work. I hope it returns stronger, not weaker.
