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The REALTORS® Association of Edmonton (RAE), founded in 1927, is a professional association of real estate brokers and associates in the Greater Edmonton Area and beyond.
Welcome to the RAE-dio podcast brought to you by RAE, the Realtors Association of Edmonton. So that's the Ray in our radio. We deliver easy to understand market insights, some homeowner tips, perspectives from industry experts so that you can feel informed and empowered wherever you are in your home ownership journey because better decisions start with better information. And joining us is Realtors Association of Edmonton CEO, Larry Westergaard. Hello, Larry.
Larry:Glad to be here, Mark. How are you?
Mark:I'm good. And Larry, obviously the leader of a bunch of realtors has to be a realtor himself. You were a realtor for many, many years. What brought you and drew you to that way of making your living?
Larry:Well, I have to blame my father. I was working actually for a significant retail company here in Canada and working on salary. And he got tired of listening to me complaining about being overworked and underpaid. And he said, well, why don't you come and partner with me so then if you complain about being overworked and underpaid, it's only your fault. You can't blame anybody else.
Larry:So yeah, in 1996, he got me into the business.
Mark:And so what was it like for you then? Did you take to it right away? Was it a bit of a struggle? Because I mean, realtors work long hours.
Larry:Yeah. It was a struggle. You know, back then training was here's a phone book. Don't start at the beginning. Don't start at the end.
Larry:Start somewhere in the middle and, you know, start asking people if they would like to do business with you. And that and door knocking and all those, more traditional types of trying to find business and get strangers to want to work with you is what you did. And it took time. Know, it's all like baseball when, you know, a 300 average is considered really good and the journeyman has a, you know, probably the Mendoza line at $2.25. So you just have to build your skills from there.
Mark:Well, that gives you a lot of a very good background in your current role because a lot of what you do now is to support realtors in trying to learn all the things that you learned along the way. How did you come to this role? How did you get into the management side of the Realtors Association?
Larry:Well, so I had a brokerage. I had a brokerage here in Edmonton for a number of years. And then I was also a volunteer at the board. I was president of the board in 2010. And you start to be exposed to the administrative side a little bit.
Larry:We had a really great CEO then, Ron Hutchison. And you know, he was really great in allowing us to be part of the decision making on the admin side. So you get to see that a little bit. And then in 2016, I had the opportunity to go down to Red Deer when they were looking for someone to take over the EO for that board. And so I took the leap, went to a smaller board and we helped them for about eight years.
Larry:And then the opportunity came to come back home.
Mark:Wow. That's almost like radio because here we are radio, you know, r a e d o. But in radio, when I was coming up, I went to Fort McMurray, then I went to Red Deer. You learn kind of the way things work and you gain a lot of experience from other people. And for you, guess, exposed you to another market and I'm sure that was a huge learning curve.
Larry:Oh, absolutely. I have to say that, you know, realtors are realtors and there's a lot of similarities. But you know, again, a smaller market, a lot of different needs even though some of them are similar. You're right. It does allow you to gain a little bit of a different perspective on what a I don't wanna say small town, but a smaller market realtor needs for services.
Larry:And you can also then bring some of what you know from a larger market down there. So you have a little bit of that cross pollination as well.
Mark:So having been in the trenches, so to speak as a realtor, how does that influence how you lead the organization?
Larry:Well, it definitely gives you a perspective on what the member needs. So it allows you I think to really temper some of the decisions which you might make for just purely business reasons and put that lens on and color it with, okay, great. The business decision is this, but is that going to be good for a realtor? Are we creating an environment with that business decision that allows our members to have the best chance of success? And sometimes there's a dichotomy there on those two types of decisions.
Larry:So you have to find that compromise. You know, and sometimes quite honestly, we don't make the best business decision because it wouldn't be in the best interest of the members as a whole.
Mark:Right. Because it's not a zero sum game. Know, it's not always about, I guess, money coming in, money coming out. There's a certain feel to the business of realty. It's a real people game, so to speak, right?
Mark:It's about those relationships.
Larry:Well, You know, one of the things I really miss about being a realtor is working with buyers, especially first time homeowners and helping them realize the dream of home ownership. So some of those personal skills and wanting to help you translate into wanting to make sure that you're creating that environment for the member and you're helping the member. So you're right. It's a lot more personal. Dad used to have a slogan which he used to say, a personal touch with a professional approach.
Larry:And I think, you know, we wanna carry that forward in how we deal with our members.
Mark:Larry, I know you're a sports guy, so we'll use a little sports analogy here. You go from being a player and maybe a coach when you're a realtor helping people fulfill that dream of the championship to being the general manager or the owner. So you can see that the things that you do can have an influence on getting that win for the realtor and for the buyer and for the seller, but you're not right in the trenches. So it's a different feel, would say, right?
Larry:Oh, absolutely. And you you take a look just from an oiler's perspective, Plan Savr, Craig McTavish, Kevin Lowe. You've got some really good players made great coaches and general managers.
Mark:So let's talk about Ray, the Realtors Association of Edmonton. In the simplest terms, what is it that you do?
Larry:In the simplest terms, we are here to provide the services for the member that allow them the best opportunity to succeed in their business. So MLS, we administer the MLS. We make sure that everybody is functioning within the same rule set so that the data that the public sees and that the public can use to make informed decisions is the same. So the same fields, etcetera. And everybody is inputting the data in the same type of quality and quantity that the public then can see.
Larry:And then we also provide arbitration and professional standard services for our members to be able to adjudicate disputes between members.
Mark:And and there's probably lots of other organizations that involve real estate that people have known about and and wonder how connected they are or what they are. So the the real estate boards, is that that's different from what you do and what are the roles there?
Larry:Well, so in Alberta, you have the local boards. So there's 10 local boards across the province. Then you have the provincial association which tends to to focus mostly on advocacy with the with the provincial government and then helping all of us local boards coordinate some of the things that we have such as forms. And then you have the Real Estate Council of Alberta, which is the provincial regulator who manages licensing and they they handle the public side. So if I if you as a member of the public had a concern about a transaction or a realtor, you would go to Rica versus coming to us as a local board.
Larry:And
Mark:then I I imagine that as a group, you help individual realtors sort of navigate that territory as well to help them understand what everybody's role is.
Larry:Yeah. So we do a lot of facilitation between the individual member and their broker because each individual realtor has to belong to a brokerage or an office. And then through that, then they get licensed and they have their license parked with Rika. So, you know, we'll help them a little bit with that process into understanding who they need to talk about and talk to in a lot of these circumstances, and then just point them in the right direction.
Mark:Well, let's talk a little bit about the folks that do the work, the realtors who you represent. What do you think one of the biggest misconceptions about realtors might be?
Larry:I would say that the biggest misconception that is out there is that it is a monolith. So for instance, if you're listening to the national news, they talk a lot about the real estate market is going up and down. And it's a very monolithic type of conversation because they're focused on really two markets being the entire country, Toronto and Vancouver. Real estate is a lot more local and it's a lot more segmented within those local markets. So each one of our members really is an individual business person.
Larry:Even though they work at an office for the most part, you're setting up your own individual business. So when I was a realtor, I was Larry Inc. You know, it wasn't you know, the difference was it wasn't like going into Canadian Tire and my clients could choose whatever off the shelves and I would have, you know, I would make money right away. Larry Inc had a lot more work to do before it could actually make any money. And so each one of our members is doing that.
Larry:You know, they're creating, they're managing their own business and creating those relationships on an individual one on one with their clients. And I think I don't think a lot of the the public, you know, on the other side of the curtain per se understands that. They just see real estate and realtors as a monolith where everybody is sort of doing the same thing every day and day in and day out. And it just doesn't work that way.
Mark:I think one other thing that maybe a lot of people don't understand and I came to understand as I was looking for houses when I was a young person, when I when I first, know, thought I could afford a house and went looking, was it real estate agents, many of them, they concentrate on a specific area of the city. So if you're looking in the Southwest as opposed to the Northeast, you might wanna engage with an agent who really specializes in that area. Is that fair to say?
Larry:To a certain extent. I think the biggest thing that if I could give advice to somebody that's looking to buy and sell is to work with somebody you're comfortable with. Nowadays, the tools are there that will allow members to understand the market. Edmonton is a large market, but we do a really great job of providing tools for our members to help them understand whichever part of the the city that they want to work in. So if you and I were working together, well, people behind the curtain, my wife and I are looking for a house right now.
Larry:So, you know, we weren't focused on working with a realtor in this area or that area in this area. We were more focused on working with our agent who we're comfortable with and we're confident this is gonna help us. And we know that she has the knowledge to be able to find us what we're looking at, looking for wherever it is within the city. She also has a patience of a saint. But yeah.
Larry:So I would focus on more so the realtor versus the area now. Twenty years ago, I would say that was a little different. You had more neighborhood specialists and I don't wanna knock those of our members who are neighborhood specialists because it, you know, it does allow you to, you know, have instant recall on everything and anything in that market that has sold or will sell or it's on the market. But the the business has become a lot more capable of handling a much larger market area.
Mark:So when you're talking about comfort, a big part of that I think is a sense of trust. I think that you want to deal with somebody who you feel like, oh, feel like this person has my best interests at heart and that we've communicated well, they understand what I'm looking for. And so that trust I would say is a big part of it, right?
Larry:Absolutely. You know, for most people, it's the largest transaction they're ever going to do. Nowadays that transaction keeps getting larger and larger. So to have somebody that you're confident is going to be able to give you all the information you need to make an informed decision is critical. You know, you need to be able to understand and be confident that that person is giving that advice to you to help you make the decision not just to make a transaction.
Mark:Why do you think it's important to have a realtor's association at all? What does it do for the consumer?
Larry:For the consumer, it allows them to understand that there's one central point that the agents are going to have to comply with specific set of rules and procedures so that the consumer knows that everybody is working on an even playing field. So that there is a uniform set of ethics and rules that everybody has to comply with. And also, you know, that database, to have that database and know that there's only one stop shopping when you're dealing with somebody to know everything that you're looking for is one one spot. Next year is our hundredth anniversary. So if you go back a hundred years ago, before organized real estate existed in the Edmonton area, if you were a buyer, you'd have to probably visit 15 places down Jasper Avenue and go into each one of them to find all the listings that were on the market.
Larry:And then, you know, if you didn't like that, you might have to go and take a trolley across the high level to go over to Strathcona to see all the real estate companies there had for sale too. So having that one spot where, you know, you could rely that you were gonna see everything that you wanted to look at to find your home, You know, that sets a lot of comfort for the consumer.
Mark:Well, I'd love to hear some of those stories from a hundred years ago and I'm sure you'll be rolling that out when you're celebrating the anniversary. That'll be pretty cool. Now, one of the strategic plans of the real estate association and things that you focus on is professionalism. And you mentioned as as your father told you, that was one of his mottos as well. So how do you define it?
Mark:What would you say professional professionalism means for a realtor?
Larry:It sounds like it's an easy question because everybody thinks they know what professionalism is and, you know, go to go back to that sports analogy, you know, you that eye test allows you to when you're looking at a baseball player or hockey player, you know, you know the professionals when you're watching the rink. So it sounds like it's an easy question. But it's one we struggle with, is actually defining what professionalism is. I read a quote once from a senior district court US judge, and she defined professionalism as being good at what you do and doing good with it. So I think, you know, to translate that, education, knowledge, experience are all parts of growing professionalism, but then being able to put that into practice on a day to day business basis.
Larry:So, you know, not only walking the walk, but talking the talk. So as a professional, it's not just good enough for yourself to hold yourself to certain standards, but it's also having the intestinal fortitude to point out and when others aren't being professional. And that's tough.
Mark:Oh, yeah. That's a tough one for sure.
Larry:Yeah. So, you know, in our industry, one of the big things I've always heard, you know, whether it be when I was down in Red Deer or here is, well, yeah, I have a problem with that, but I might have to do a deal with that guy tomorrow. So I don't wanna make a big deal out of it. And my response has always been, well, you're just as culpable then because you're condoning bad behavior by not calling it out. And that goes back to that whole idea of people get away with bad things when good people don't do anything about it.
Larry:So that's a key part of professionalism as well.
Mark:Yeah, absolutely. Upholding those standards. That's great. Let's talk about the current market, Larry. What's the market like right now?
Mark:What are the headlines missing or what do you see happening out there people are telling you?
Larry:So if I knew what the market was gonna do a 100%, we wouldn't be having this conversation because I'm back in Hawaii now.
Mark:Yeah.
Larry:I think though we are probably moving into more of a steady market. Edmonton has been and continues to be a very affordable place. I would suggest probably the most affordable large market in Canada. But I think we are moving a little bit more out of that seller's market, more into a traditional balanced market. So we're just into those sliding into the beginnings of that balanced market.
Larry:It's probably a little bit too soon to make that call a 100% until we get into the spring market because we still are in that transitory winter market where, you know, even though listings are coming up in numbers, they aren't in what we would traditionally see, you know, a month from now. You know, one of the struggles is being where we are and being who I am. I don't wanna get into a situation where I call a market and then it becomes self fulfilling because then you have people, you know, panic and then all of a sudden the inventory levels spike because people think that they need to take advantage in the seller's market Now before it does move forward into more of a balanced market and then the inventory numbers come and spike up higher, and then we truly would be in a balanced market. So to hedge my bet a little bit, I would say we are on that cusp. We have enjoyed for the past a number of years some really uncommon activity.
Larry:I think we're moving more towards a balanced spring market. We'll probably know a little bit more in a month or so. I think the Ordiners are still gonna make the playoffs. We'll probably know in 10 more games.
Mark:A lot of people might be listening to this podcast when the Ordiners are in the playoffs. Who knows? Fingers crossed either way. Larry, we'd like with to finish this question. What do you think makes a house a home?
Larry:Quite honestly, it's where my wife and cats are. As long as I have my wife, as long as I have my cats, and as long as we're safe, we can make a home out of anything.
Mark:That's an awesome answer. Larry, thanks so much for this. Appreciate it.
Larry:Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it too. Thanks.