Want to run in our 2022 Board of Directors election? Candidate applications due by November 15

Are you interested in running to serve on the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver’s (REBGV) Board of Directors?

If you have the skills and experience to serve your professional association, we want to hear from you!

The deadline to apply to run in our 2022 Board of Directors election is 5 p.m. on Monday, November 15. Email becomeadirector@rebgv.org to get your application process started.

To learn more about the work and time commitment needed to serve on the Board of Directors, click here.

Skills needed in new directors

Each year, the Board of Directors appoints a Board Development Committee (BDC) to guide the process of identifying and recommending high-quality Director candidates for election.

Part of this work involves annually assessing the skillsets most needed to strengthen and diversify the talent around the current Board of Directors’ table.

In consultation with the current Board of Directors, the BDC has prioritized candidates with the following experience, knowledge, and characteristics for this year’s election:

• Members with experience running a business, including business acumen and strategy. This includes Managing Brokers.
• A balance of female and male directors who come from diverse ethnic backgrounds and cultures.
• Diversity of thought and high emotional intelligence, which is a characteristic necessary for the teamwork that helps the directorate innovate and responsibly lead our organization.
• A service-first attitude where the desire to serve on the Board isn’t driven by self-interest.
• Experience in governance with other organizations.

Click here to learn more about the BDC’s work.

Get updates from your Board at our November 9 member meeting

REBGV's Board of Directors is hosting this year's member meeting November 9 at 10 a.m.! Join us for an online session with CEO Brad Scott and Chair Taylor Biggar.

Presentation topics include:

• Updates on our strategic plan.
• MLS® and professionalism research initiatives.
• The future of MLS® technology.
• How REALTORS® and the real estate profession are changing.
• Succession planning at REBGV.
• And more.

Watch a meeting preview with Taylor Biggar:

This will be an interactive session with plenty of opportunities for you to ask questions or share your opinions.

How to register

Our member meeting is free to attend, but you need to register to receive a link to the meeting. Click here to register.

Remember, you’ll receive one PDP hour for attending the meeting.

We hope to see you there!

The REALTORS Care® Blanket Drive is back!

The 27th annual REALTORS Care® Blanket Drive starts on November 15, but you can start gathering your donations now!

We’re collecting blankets and other warm clothing again after a hiatus last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

We’re looking for donations of:

• Warm clothing
  • Coats
  • Sweaters
  • Gloves/hats/scarves
• Blankets, sleeping bags
• New socks
• New underwear

We’re also continuing our online fundraiser. All proceeds go directly to help local charities. Click here to make a donation.

COVID-19 was hard for all of us last year, but it was especially difficult for our charities and the people they help keep warm during the winter months.

This year we can help. Start collecting your blankets, warm clothing, and new socks and undergarments for this year’s REALTORS Care® Blanket Drive. This year’s event runs from November 15 until November 22. 

For information on drop-off locations and more, visit www.blanketdrive.ca. You can also follow this year’s efforts and share your stories on social media. Visit our Blanket Drive Facebook Page and tag your posts using these hashtags:

#realtorscare #blanketdrive #realtorscareblanketdrive 

Stay tuned for more details in the days and weeks ahead!

Lawful versus "not cool"

Laws, regulator requirements, and our standards are written documents and easy to find. For example, you can go to the REALTOR® Code of Ethics or Rules of Cooperation, scroll to the appropriate standards and read what they have to say.

Ditto for BC Financial Services Authority’s Rules and the Real Estate Services Act.

As well, there’s a thicket of other written statutes and requirements governing what we do. If there’s a rule or a law, deciding what to do can be quite easy. Just follow the requirement and carry on. I think that’s why we often say things like, “we need a rule for that.” It makes things easy. You don’t have to think.

But sometimes there is no law, a rule isn’t clear, or a standard is open to some interpretation. That’s when things can get exciting. The lawyers may weigh in. Or regulatory advisors. Or someone like me. Or someone with the loudest voice on a chat site. (That’s okay; everyone can have an opinion but be careful who you listen to.)

In these “grey” situations, before you act, remind yourself who your client is and what your agency duties are. Give a thought to your reputation, as well as to the collective reputation of the profession. We’ve all got skin in the game for what we do. We’re judged by the public’s collective experience of us. You could also try asking yourself whether you’d be embarrassed if others were to find out what you just did (or are thinking of doing).

I’m talking about those actions that are lawful and don’t break any rules, but that your colleagues and probably their clients consider as being “not cool.” Which is another way of saying, “It may be legal, but what you just did sucks.”

It can be tough to defend yourself in the public square by arguing, “Hey, what’s your problem? What I did was legal.” You might be technically right, but you won’t be convincing. It’s an example of winning the battle but losing the war.

Remember those 20 or so Canadian politicians who ignored provincial health officer guidelines and left the country for a holiday last Christmas? Understandably, some Canadians (maybe many) were indignant. “WTH,” they said. “We’re all hunkered down at home, not seeing our families and these clowns ignored what the government was asking and left town for a holiday.” It didn’t play well, as they say. A few of those politicians defended themselves by saying they hadn’t actually broken the law, so what was the problem? “The health officers’ wishes were just guidelines, after all,” they said. This argument didn’t play well.

In our recent federal election, one candidate’s history of flipping properties for profit (before he stood for office) became a topic of conversation. Flipping properties for profit is legal. But given that some, maybe many, think flipping properties contributes to the high cost of housing, the candidate’s actions caused a kerfuffle. “Well, it may have been legal but it wasn’t cool, especially when your party’s platform had lots to say about housing affordability,” seemed to be the collective reply. To the candidate’s credit, he didn’t try to defend himself by arguing what he did was legal, but I suspect he probably had a few uncomfortable days before being elected with this issue in the spotlight.

There’s a good lesson for us all in here. We’re in a profession. Professionals are expected to look after their clients, to be competent, and to have an eye for the public good. Doing something that isn’t a breach but casts a negative light on the profession doesn’t help improve our 45 to 50 per cent approval rating.

Saying, “I didn’t break the law” or “I met the minimum legal standard” just doesn’t cut it. Is that what you want written as your epitaph? How proud would you be if your headstone said, “Not a bad person, they didn’t break the law”? Is that the best we can do? Let’s aim higher. Other professions do.

Top tip: Article index available

In a recent conversation, a managing broker suggested that since not all members read this column (perish the thought) it would be handy to have a quick reference guide to all the articles I’ve written on delayed offers, DRPOS, and the like. Do you know my trusty copy editor and indexer Teresa (a UBC School of Information Science, SFU tech writing, and Harvard journalism graduate), has indexed every column I’ve ever written since 2006? You can access the index online.

Rules of Cooperation, Rule 4.02 governs delayed offer requirements as well as the protocol to follow if an early offer comes in. Since the rule has been amended at least twice during the past five years, I’d recommend reading articles on the subject written in 2018 or later (preferably, the latest one, written September 8, 2021).

Systemizing success: How REBGV ensures excellent service

Did you know your Board has a wide variety of systems in place to solicit feedback, foster innovation, and provide the best customer service possible?

These systems are part of REBGV’s Excellence program—our continuous strategic approach to, and application of, leading business principles and practices in leadership, governance, planning, customer service, people engagement, process improvement and organizational performance and development.

Your Board has been recognized for this approach, receiving the Canada Award of Excellence—Platinum Certification in its Excellence, Innovation, and Wellness Standard from Excellence Canada in 2019.

Now we’re working toward the next, and final, level of certification from Excellence Canada, the Order of Excellence. To help us reach this level, we’ve instituted and improved processes across all departments.

Here are a few of the systems we’ve been working on.

Customer Experience Plan

Our commitment to providing the best possible service has been formalized in our Customer Experience Plan, which highlights the many ways we serve you, our plans to ensure we continue to deliver excellent service, and the measurements we use to make sure we’re doing the job right.

Using your feedback

Your feedback is a key component in how we plan new services and offerings for you, as well as how we measure the success of our efforts. We collect your feedback in a number of ways, from surveys and polls to focus groups and comments collected at Board events.

There are plenty of examples of how we turn your feedback into new products and services. For example, after receiving feedback on our invoicing process, we changed how we deliver our month-end statements, sending them to you online instead of by mail. The result? Savings 20,000 sheets of paper per month and reducing our average monthly postage costs from around $2,600 to just $120. We’re also working on an improvement that will give third parties, like accountants, secure access to these statements, again based on feedback we received from office managers and brokers.

Paragon is another example. We receive regular feedback from members on how to improve the system. We told Black Knight, the providers of Paragon, that our members need updates faster, and we worked with them to strengthen our partnership and explore new ways for your feedback to influence changes within the system.

We have a members-come-first mindset at the Board, but we take it a step further. We seek to provide an experience that is welcoming, responsive, helpful, knowledgeable, and service-oriented in our dealings with you.

Excellence Canada

Your Board has been on an excellence journey since 1996. That’s when we began our relationship with Excellence Canada (formerly the National Quality Institute). Founded in 1992 by Industry Canada, Excellence Canada is an independent, not-for-profit corporation dedicated to advancing organizational performance across Canada.

What began as a way to expose our organization to leading business practices has evolved into a workplace culture that fosters creativity, innovation, and a mindset of continual improvement. At the heart of it all is our people: our members and our staff. We strive to provide the best possible service to our members, and we equip our staff with the tools and resources necessary to deliver that service.

As we look forward, we’ll continue to provide the best possible services, products, and offerings in line with our commitment to excellence with you.

Congratulations to our 2021 scholarship recipients!

We've awarded the children of five members with post-secondary entrance scholarships.

Each recipient received $1,500 toward this year’s education costs. The scholarships are based on performance in academics, athletics, fine arts, and community service.

This year’s recipients are:

Amos Cheng, son of Nixon Cheng, Regent Park Fairchild Realty Ltd.

 

 

 

 

Samantha Ma, daughter of Becky Ma, Royal Pacific Realty (Kingsway) Ltd.

 

 

 

 

Kaitlyn Loo, daughter of John Loo, Park Georgia Realty Ltd.

 

 

 

 

 

Keean Fisk, son of Preston Fisk, Macdonald Realty

 

 

 

 

 

Tessa Fisk, daughter of Preston Fisk, Macdonald Realty

 

 

 

 

 

Good luck to our recipients, and to everyone who applied!