Nearly two years into the American Real Estate Association’s existence, the professional organization and alternative to the National Association of Realtors has found its inaugural executive director, Inman has learned.
Effective immediately, real estate vet and legal expert Mary-Frances Coleman has stepped into the role as the association continues to grow steadily with new members.
Jason Haber
Coleman’s extensive professional experience has always straddled real estate and law, and she most recently worked as a consultant. However, many real estate professionals may know her from posts as COO of eXp Realty, CEO and president of Realty Executives and vice president of operations at HomeSmart.
“Mary-Frances checks off every single box,” Jason Haber of Compass, one of the association’s cofounders, told Inman. “She’s experienced in the industry, she’s respected in the industry, she’s known in the industry, and I think most important of all, she’s a force of nature.”
The association conducted a national search for the role and reviewed more than 700 resumes during the search process, Haber said, and Coleman’s drive for change helped her resume rise to the top.
“She can pick any job she wants in real estate right now,” Haber said. “She could be the CEO of a publicly traded firm, she could run a brokerage, she could do anything. She really, really wants to do this, which is so interesting to me. She has a passion for change and for innovating, and I think she sees with us, that she can lead a national effort at ARA.”
Mauricio Umansky | The Agency
ARA now has more than 30,000 members, and has seen top-tier firms like Douglas Elliman join its member ranks this year. Board members said Coleman is just the person to help the association accelerate its growth across the country.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Mary-Frances Coleman as the first Executive Director of the American Real Estate Association,” Mauricio Umansky, founder and CEO of The Agency and ARA co-founder, said in a statement emailed to Inman. “A respected voice and proven leader in our industry, Mary-Frances brings invaluable experience and passion to ARA’s mission. Her leadership will help drive forward our shared vision of collaboration, transparency, and progress for agents and brokerages nationwide.”
Briggs Elwell, co-founder of agent services company RLTYco and a member of ARA’s board of directors, agreed that Coleman’s experience growing businesses in the industry — particularly the way she helped grow eXp from 4,000 to 16,000 agents during her year-and-a-half tenure — places her at ARA at the perfect time.
Briggs Elwell | RLTYco
“[Coleman’s] track record in the industry, what she did when she was helping to build out eXp, and her emphasis on the agents and partnerships in particular, those two topics for us really exemplify the direction of where we’re trying to take the association,” Elwell told Inman. “ARA, at the end of the day, is intended to lift up the brokerage community and to assist in bettering the lives and the experiences for the agent, which then results in a better outcome for the consumer.”
Elwell added that finding someone who both understood ARA’s short- and long-term vision and was capable of executing it was the real challenge during the hiring process, but the board feels very confident in Coleman as their choice of executive director.
“Being able to find a person that can execute and actually aligns with the vision is a very unique thing when you’re interviewing for a role,” Elwell said. “She had it to a point where Jason and I, at the end of one of her interviews, were like, ‘I think she understands the vision better than we do.'”
Over the course of her career, Coleman, who grew up in a real estate family, spent time as an agent, a lawyer, a broker and more, and helped various brokerages and associations develop real estate training courses for agents. But over time, she told Inman, she became disillusioned with the industry as a whole, which is why after she left eXp Realty, she launched her consulting firm.
Mary-Frances Coleman | Credit: Carrie Evans
“I opened a consulting firm just to kind of take a step back, and then all of the class-action lawsuits happened,” Coleman told Inman. “But for probably the past 10 years, I’ve been really struggling with the structure of the associations and the MLSs, and the fact that agents don’t really understand how this works. So I got out for two years. I said, ‘I’m done with real estate, I’m getting out, I don’t want to be a part of it. It’s not growing, it’s not moving, it’s not changing.’
“My pet peeve is, ‘That’s the way it’s always been done,'” Coleman added. “If I’m running a company and if I ask an executive, ‘Why does the company do it this way?’ and they say, ‘That’s the way we’ve always done it,’ I’m probably going to fire somebody, because that doesn’t work for me.”
Coleman joined ARA’s board about one year ago and said she is proud of what the organization is trying to build, in giving agents a true say in how their industry is run, instead of being told the results after the fact.
Within the next year, Coleman said she’s looking forward to growing the association’s numbers and putting in place an educational component for members that includes certification programs and designations. She is also hoping to reestablish professional standards to build up the industry’s credibility with consumers. After that, Coleman said the association will tackle whatever its members want to see next and will solicit feedback on the association’s next initiatives by polling members.
Coleman sees the real estate market and economic outlook as the biggest challenge for the association right now, but in a close second is the “that’s the way it’s always been done” mentality.
“We want to change that,” Coleman said. “We don’t want that to happen anymore, and we want agents to understand that business doesn’t have to be done that way.
“I can deal with everything external,” the executive director continued. “It’s the internal stuff that causes great harm to our own reputation and our own profession amongst the consumers. I think that will be something that we definitely want to address here as an association … Being a licensed professional is a great responsibility and I think that the challenge that we would face right now as an industry from our own internal squabbling has now spilled out into the consumer, and they don’t know where to go.
“So that’s something that we want to be able to provide for them — we want the members to be able to proudly wear our badge of honor that they are a member of the association and to be able to explain to the consumer what that means, because they need a true professional. We have licenses, we have standards, we have regulations, and then our association will give them a standard of professional responsibility that we’re crafting as we speak.”
