NAR’s Code of Ethics is powerful — when we uphold it 

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The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author.

I hold two licenses I'm proud of: I'm a real estate broker, and I'm a lawyer. I've taken both professions' oaths, read both of their codes, and seen the inside of both of their disciplinary systems. 

Most people assume I'd call law the "serious" profession and real estate the "casual" one. I don't. Real estate could stand shoulder to shoulder with the bar — because I've read our Code of Ethics, and it is, honestly, a beautiful document. It opens with "Under all is the land." It invokes the Golden Rule by name. It asks us to put the client's interest first. The words are already there. What's missing is the responsibility to uphold them.

The gap between law and real estate is not the bar exam or three years of school. It is where words turn into duties.

More than words on paper

The American Bar Association, like the National Association of Realtors, is a voluntary organization, and its Model Rules are exactly that — a model. Aspirations on paper that, on their own, bind no one. What makes a lawyer's ethics real is the state. In my home state of Georgia, you cannot practice law without belonging to the State Bar. The state adopts its own rules of conduct and enforces them through a disciplinary system that can take your livelihood. 

Real estate has the same architecture — a mandatory government commission — but the part meant to lift us above the legal minimum, our own Code, we treat as optional. Only about half of Georgia's licensed agents even carry the Realtor designation. One hundred percent of practicing lawyers belong to the Bar, because the profession decided its standards were not a choice.

We shouldn't be asking clients to decide if competence matters

One of the most visible differences between these two professions is the expectation of competence.  

A lawyer's first duty under Rule 1.1 is to have the knowledge and skill a matter requires. For example, if a trademark attorney is handed a contested custody case, she declines it. She is ethically bound to.

In real estate, practicing outside your knowledge and skill is allowed — as long as the client consents. In law, it is a disciplinary violation, and at its worst, disbarment, because some duties are not the client's alone to waive.

Let me head off the fair objection: Don't clients have a right to choose cheaper, lighter services? Yes — but that is a different question. My daughter is a veterinarian. A medication I'd pay $70 for at the pharmacy runs $7 to $14 from a veterinary supplier — same drug, same manufacturer, same dose. For the right need, choosing the lower-cost path isn't substandard; it's smart. Limited service, a flat fee, a private sale — a client can knowingly choose any of them, and that is consent doing honest work over scope and price. 

What consent cannot do is manufacture competence the agent doesn't have. Choosing less service is the client's call. Being led to believe you're getting expertise that isn't there is not a choice — it's misrepresentation. 

We can't even agree on the bare minimum

At the Realtors Legislative Meetings last month, NAR's Professional Standards Committee presented a proposal two years in the making. They recommended adding a new standard of practice to the Code of Ethics requiring Realtors to inform a client if they lacked the knowledge or skill for their property type or market.

Let's consider how modest this proposed reform actually was. 

The committee didn't say Realtors had to decline the offer to represent the client. It merely proposed disclosure — something the committee's own chair said was the bare minimum we should all be doing already. It was the only proposal at the meeting to prompt debate, and after nearly an hour of discussions, the board sent it back to committee. 

The standard doesn't even say "You must be competent," just "Be honest when you're not." And we couldn't pass it.

The objection that sank it is the tell. One director warned that the moment you disclose a knowledge gap, "you've lost that trust with the consumer for the rest of your relationship." Read that again: It admits that the trust was riding on the client not knowing. That the relationship runs on the appearance of competence rather than the fact of it. That is not an argument against disclosure — it is the strongest argument for it. 

The committee's decision suggests that our profession isn't quite ready to live by its own ideals. The good news is the standard isn't dead. It can return at NAR NXT in November, and we can simply pass it.

What kind of profession do we hope to be?

The question of whose interest comes first runs beneath the louder fights of the moment. 

Designated agency is real estate's version of a law firm's "Chinese wall": a legitimate screen for the conflicts you cannot avoid, not a license for the ones you manufacture. A firm that engineers the in-house double-end or keeps a listing behind its own door and calls it a service has answered the question the wrong way. Whether we label it a "private exclusive" or "office exclusive" to manufacture designated agency, the test is the same: Is this serving the client or the firm?

The professions that police their own keep their autonomy; those that don't get a government regulator. Mortgage brokers didn't discipline themselves before 2008, and that led to the CFPB. Strong self-regulation isn't the enemy of freedom — it's the price of keeping it.

Good agents want higher standards. We don't need the bar exam, we just need to live by our own Code — to make competence a duty, not a suggestion, and to treat the standard not as a ceiling we brag about but as a floor we rise from.

"Under all is the land." We already wrote the words that describe the profession we could be. The only question is whether we'll keep the promise we've already made.

Bruce Ailion is an associate broker with RE/MAX Town & Country and an attorney in metro Atlanta, where he has represented buyers, sellers, builders and investors for more than three decades. He is a past president of the Cobb Association of Realtors and holds a J.D. and a master's in real estate from Georgia State University, and a marketing degree from Emory University.