Author’s Notes: Part 2

Sometimes it’s not what you know, but who you know.

Over the past 60 years, I have had five “major” employers and several part-time ones.  In every case, I was hired, not just because of my resume, but because I knew the employer, or I knew someone the employer knew. My first full-time newspaper job I landed because of a referral from a journalism prof.  My first association executive position in Reno was a promotion from board presidents I had worked with.  I landed the Marin position because I knew the retiring executive director, and subsequent positions with IREM and CCIM had similar connections.

At this point I want to stress that I am not just telling my own story, but also the story of an evolution of the real estate industry through one person’s experience.  I hope that it resonates.

When my wife and I decided to take the Marin position, we knew that my tenure was tenuous at best.  The Multiple Listing Service was the bread and butter for the Realtor Boards, and across the West Coast, it was in turmoil. Pressure from brokers to consolidate was enormous.  And internet access to listings and property data was clearly the future. I was hired to accommodate the transition to both. 

In 1994 The Marin Association of Realtors was a large and prestigious organization, with over 4,000 members, nearly all of whom were required to pay fees to the MLS.  It had 14 employees and owned a large, modern building atop a hill in San Rafael.  It printed and delivered thousands of MLS books every week, and on weekends, rented a 10,000 sq. ft. meeting space for weddings and community events. But its heyday was at an end. Brokers were tired of paying fees to every Board and MLS serving their branch offices, and they had had it.

Over the next two years, I facilitated negotiations for a regional MLS, made arrangements to sell the building and prepared the staff for layoffs, including my own. My hope was that I would have a major role in a new regional Multiple Listing Service.  But I was an administrator, not a politician, so it was not in the cards.

Meanwhile the San Fransico Chapter of the Institute of Real Estate Management (IREM) was facing its own challenges. It had lost its part-time executive director and its major trade fair was only weeks away.  The chapter president was Steve Burger, son of Eugene Burger who had several property management branch companies in the western United States. It was headquartered in Marin County.   I knew Steve from Reno when he headed his company’s office there.  We initially had an adversarial relationship because NAR required all Realtors to pay MLS monthly fees, whether or not they listed or sold properties. This provision applied to property management companies, and to commercial brokers, who, in those days did not have the exclusive listings that the MLS required. Steve and I devised an amical work-around. Years later, he approached me about administering his IREM chapter.

IREM had an office and conference room in the old Hearst Building in downtown San Francisco.  For two years I commuted daily by car or bus.  While I loved working in The City, three hours on the road to work at an office that nobody visited seemed like a waste of time and money. Once again, the old adage “Who you know…” was about to shape my fate.  

In 2003 I was asked to lunch by three leaders of the Northern California Chapter of CCIM.  The current president was Darren Merritt and the president-elect was David Saldivar.  Both IREM and CCIM designees, they had been active in the CCIM chapter as well as in IREM.  In those days it was not uncommon for the principles of small management companies to hold both designations as occasionally they had the opportunity to broker the sale or purchase of a client’s assets.  IREM and CCIM have a “fast track” road to their designations that take into account some of the education that has already been learned in pursuit of the other’s designation. 

The third party at that momentous lunch meeting was Bob Rosenberg, CCIM chapter president in 2002.  As fate would have it, I had known Bob since my days as a newspaper editor in the 1970’s. Bob was then a residential broker practicing in Chester, one of four small towns that had newspapers owned by the publishing company for which I was news editor.  He was active with the area’s Realtor Board, and the organizer of an annual NAR marketing campaign promoting the benefits of home ownership.  For three years Bob and I collaborated on annual supplements that ran in all of the company’s newspapers. Some of the content was boilerplate supplied by NAR, but each issue also had feature articles that I had assigned to the various resident reporters. And, of course, there was advertising – lots of it! Nearly every real estate office in Plumas and Lassen Counties felt they had to be represented.

Bob would come to my office in Quincy where we would sort through the articles and photographs and dummy up the layout.  When the issues went to press in the spring, I would order a sizable printing overrun so that Realtors would have a supply of issues to distribute to buyers and sellers throughout the year. The second or third year Bob entered the supplement in a contest sponsored by NAR, and it won.

Bob moved on and I did too.  He went to Sacramento to practice commercial real estate.  I went to Reno.  But here we found ourselves, years later and miles away, talking about the future of CCIM in Northern California.

I agreed to take the job of executive director of CCIM’s Northern California Chapter.  I would continue as an employee of IREM, which in turn contracted my services to CCIM.  I hastily built an office at my home in rural Sonoma County and left the streets of San Francisco forever.

For the next 16 years I wore two hats, retiring from IREM after 20 years, but staying on with CCIM for another five years.  Darren Merritt and David Saldivar would go on to also be presidents of the IREM Chapter.  During my career I worked with 54 presidents, some of them serving two terms, others, Darren and David, in two organizations.  Each came with different goals and expectations, and each contributed to The Legacy.

Terry Shores, April, 2024