Raise profession, not barriers

A recent story has caused a lot of discussion, especially on social media, and it’s a debate that seems to come up every few years in our industry. Should a college or university degree be required to sell real estate? I’ve argued both sides of this question over the years. Early in my career, I was firmly in the camp of raising the barrier to entry. Make it harder to become an agent. Require more education. Raise the professionalism of the industry by making fewer people eligible to join it. I’ve changed my mind. Not because I don’t think we should raise the bar. I absolutely do. I just no longer think the way to do it is by making it significantly harder to get into the profession.

The Diversity of Real Estate Professionals

I’ve enjoyed most about spending well over a decade in this industry is seeing the incredible variety of people who find their way into it. I’ve met teachers, firefighters, accountants, salespeople, factory workers, stay-at-home parents and new immigrants. I’ve met people who entered real estate after losing a job, and others who simply couldn’t see a future where they were. Some have gone on to build extraordinary businesses. That has always struck me as one of the beautiful things about real estate. There are few professions left where someone without a prestigious degree, without family connections and without much money can build something remarkable almost entirely on merit. Real estate is still one of them, and I’d hate to lose that.

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“The professions we admire don’t define themselves by the minimum requirements to enter them. They define themselves by the standards they set for people throughout their careers. Government determines who is allowed to practise. The profession determines what it means to become exceptional.”

Licensing vs. Professional Development

Of course, that isn’t the whole story. Most people who enter the business won’t still be here five years later. That’s true today and it would probably still be true if we required a college degree. This is a difficult profession, and no amount of classroom education changes that. What strikes me is how much emphasis we place on the education someone receives before they’re licensed, while comparatively little attention is paid to how they develop over the next 20 or 30 years. Licensing education is important, but it’s also meant to be the minimum standard. It’s the floor, not the ceiling.

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I think one of the mistakes we’ve made as an industry is looking to licensing requirements to solve what is really a professional development problem. Government has an important role to play. It should determine the minimum standard someone must meet before they’re allowed to represent the public. That’s exactly what licensing is supposed to do. But government has never been responsible for defining excellence. The professions we admire don’t define themselves by the minimum requirements to enter them. They define themselves by the standards they set for people throughout their careers. Government determines who is allowed to practise. The profession determines what it means to become exceptional. That, to me, is where the conversation should begin. Rather than asking how we make it harder to become an agent, perhaps we should be asking how we become much better at developing professionals after they are licensed.

Building a Ladder of Excellence

When I got my licence in Ontario, there was an articling period. At least that’s what we called it. In reality, it was just two additional courses that had to be completed within the first two years. In my case, I actually took the commercial course before I took residential transactions because that was the course available first. So there I was, licensed and legally able to help people buy and sell homes before I had completed the course on residential transactions. I hadn’t yet completed real estate law either. Ontario has since improved that process, but I still don’t think we’ve solved the underlying issue. If we’re going to call it articling, then it should resemble articling. I’ve seen brokerages that d