At long last, Realtor Associations are on the verge of offering bona fide sales training to its members.

The Massachusetts Association of Realtors will offer its members a formal sales training program starting next month.

Associations in over twenty other states are now reviewing programs for possible inclusion in their 2005 course offerings. These states include California, Illinois, Texas and Florida. Other interested associations are in North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia and Washington, according to Bruce Finland, CEO of RealNet Learning Systems. There are possibly other training companies negotiating with Associations in other states, as well.

According to the National Association of Realtors own research, 85 percent of those coming into the real estate field have no or very little sales experience. This means that they not only do not know how to sell, they have no concept how to prospect for sales.

Hopefully, these associations will make a serious commitment to offer a consistent sales training format that works for its members. That way, its broker/owner members can begin to trust the program and know that the agents coming out of these programs are at least trained in basic prospecting, selling and listing skills.

My hat is off to those board members who are associated with franchises that have training programs. In the short view, they may feel that they are losing a major competitive advantage to associations because they also provide a training vehicle to independent broker/owners and their agents, but they obviously see the training as being good for the industry, as well as its members.

By putting the agent first, associations and franchises will realize more revenue by a significant bulge in retention rates, because the new agent is being given a chance to become successful.

Hopefully, associations see this as a way to retain more of its members and thereby increase its revenues. The alternative is to see it as a revenue base, perhaps, which transfers concern for the quality of the training to concern for the quantity of agents taking the course.

One thing is for certain, when a large portion of those 85 percent, don't get the proper sales training, their brokers, the association and the agents lose.

The challenge for the associations is to hold the sales training companies' feet to the fire to make sure they are providing new agents with what they really need to get to a closing the fastest possible way.