Good day MAR members!
A little late on the Monday Memo today. And a short memo this week, vacation style.
Greetings from a secret location at 10,000 feet. Well, not that secret. But this is the first campground in the past week that is dark on the grid. No cell service, no 3G, no email, no text. So I’ve got to go find a signal somewhere to beam this back to MAR.
We’ve been everywhere this week, it seems! We left straight from the MAR board meeting last Tuesday, headed out to a family reunion. We did Highway 50 across Nevada, the Loneliest Road in America. We camped at 10,000 feet at Wheeler Peak in Great Basin National Park. We camped in the canyon at Zion National Park. We came back across Nevada via the Extraterrestrial Highway, which is even lonelier than the Loneliest Road in America. Now we’re on the fringes of Yosemite up near the treeline. A great week!
BAREIS NEWS
Before I left, we had a great board meeting. The highlight came early, when MAR Member and BAREIS Class B Director David Egan gave his report from BAREIS to the MAR Board of Directors. Dave has been terrific in his role this year, bringing a spirited common sense perspective as an active member of MAR.
Dave was a leader in the effort to get many of the fines at BAREIS reduced earlier this year. The last time we met with him, in May, both he and the MAR Board agreed that offering a “coming soon” feature to the MLS would resolve a great deal of the off-market sales activity. They have this feature in San Francisco, using the exact same Rappatoni system. During conversations I had with many of you, the majority agreed that this would be a good thing. MAR President-elect Matt Hughes wrote a compelling rationale for the concept and shared it with Dave to share with BAREIS.
Dave took this back to BAREIS and told us the matter was discussed at length during the last BAREIS Board of Directors meeting. It appears they are giving it some serious consideration.
Last week, BAREIS sent all of us an email asking for our input on the subject of Coming Soon listings. I encourage all of you to HERE and let BAREIS know what you think about that concept.
The other thing that Dave reported back was BAREIS’ ever-evolving position on the much-beloved “Authorization to Exclude” (SEL) form. If there is anything that will get a MAR member’s blood boiling, it’s a discussion over BAREIS’ “Authorization to Exclude” form. I myself got fined by BAREIS earlier this year for mis-, mal-, or non-feasance in my use of that form. For the record, I still have that fine under appeal (my first fine ever!), but the BAREIS appeal process is a byzantine process…to put it politely. But I digress, and that’s for another memo.
Back to the Authorization to Exclude form. It’s an enormously cumbersome bit of overhead. Over the past couple of months, BAREIS has chosen to step it up a notch further, with the plan to require Brokers to sign every single SEL, a document that BAREIS requires to be in its hands within 3 days.
Dave told us that there is a discussion to do away with the “return-to-BAREIS-within-3-days” rule. Or evolve it. You’d still have to get the form signed, but with it being the brokers’ responsibility to collect that form.
That certainly makes sense to me. It’s up to the brokers to police all the other forms in a transaction…most of which carry legal and risk management consequences. I don’t see why brokers can’t police the SEL form as well.
Also, just think of the productivity boost to the entire North Bay Real Estate ecosystem, with all the agents and brokers and staff and BAREIS staff not be collectively worried about one little form getting from point-A to point-B within three days. Maybe go sell some more real estate? Or spend time servicing our clients?
This all certainly sounds like a good idea to me.
What do you think? You can let me know…or better-yet, you can let Dave Egan, our BAREIS Director, know by clicking HERE. Just think of all the things we could all do with the “found time” we’d get back from the universe if the SEL process were streamlined?
WELCOME SHARON LUCE
In another bit of business at MAR, it is with great pleasure that I get to report that the MAR Board of Directors voted unanimously to appoint MAR member Sharon Luce to fill an open board seat for the remainder of 2014. Sharon has previously served on the board, and we are excited to have her smart voice back in the room.
That’s it for this week, now back to my vacation
Blaine Morris
2014 MAR President
