Dear Editor:

Wednesday’s story about the Gallup Poll’s annual Honesty and Ethics rankings of professions made some excellent points, especially that real estate professionals have a long way to go to achieve the public recognition they deserve.

We can’t prove that the NAR Public Awareness Campaign is responsible for the three-point uptick in the way the public perceives real estate agents, but the Gallup findings mirror what we found in the Riter Research study that we conducted to measure the effectiveness of the Public Awareness Campaign. We found public attitudes towards REALTORS have improved more than Gallup’s ranking of real estate professionals.

You rightly ask “what happened in 1998 when the dip when down to 14 percent?” NAR’s campaign did not begin until July, 1998 and ran only two months that year. Our campaign did not begin in earnest until 1999, and we saw the best results this year when we were able afford to add radio to the media mix and extend the advertising buy from March until Labor Day. Next year we plan an equally aggressive advertising buy.

The $5 in additional member assessments approved by the NAR Board two weeks ago in San Francisco takes effect in 2002, and will allow us to continue the campaign at its current level despite about a 30 percent increase in advertising costs since the campaign began. The Board’s willingness to take the unpopular step of raising the assessment certainly speaks to the widespread support the campaign enjoys among the REALTOR community.

Attitudes towards a profession change slowly, even under the best of circumstances. As you put it, “any improvement is something to crow about.”

Sincerely,

Steve Cook
Vice President, Public Affairs
National Association of REALTORS

Published: December 5, 2000

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.