In an unusual, if not unprecedented, move for a major trade organization, the National Association of Realtors has taken full ownership for any and all discriminatory actions taken over the years by the 1.4 million agents and brokers for which it speaks.

Of course, realty pros aren’t the only ones who have been complicit in directing people of color away from white neighborhoods, pushing them into more expensive financing or denying them access to homeownership altogether. Lenders and appraisers have been part of the problem, too -- and so have some owners, who refuse to sell to African Americans.

But on the day after he was installed as the 2021 president of NAR -- the nation’s largest trade association -- Charlie Oppler apologized on behalf of the business for past policies that contributed to segregation and racial inequality in America.

In 1968, the group opposed passage of the Fair Housing Act. And at one time, it excluded some members of the profession based on both race and sex. The discrimination was all part of what NAR now says was a “systematic policy” of residential racial segregation led by the federal government and supported by the banking system and other segments of the real estate business.

But two recent events, in particular, underscored the need for the association to take the racial inequity bull by the horns. One was a three-year investigation by New York publication Newsday, which found widespread separate and unequal treatment of minorities by nearly 100 Long Island agents. Published in late 2019, the study covered some 5,750 listings and found that Asians were discriminated against 19% of the time; Hispanics, 39% of the time; and African Americans, 49%.

The other occurred in October in Scottsdale, Arizona, where a real estate agent confronted two Black men who were filming in front of his condominium building, telling them that the area was a “no n----- zone.” He was arrested and charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct, and was subsequently fired by his brokerage.

“What Realtors did was an outrage to our morals and our ideals. It was a betrayal of our commitment to fairness and equality ... We were wrong,” Oppler said during a virtual summit on fair housing in November. “On behalf of our industry, we can say that what Realtors did was shameful, and we are sorry.”

However, the trade group has no issues, at least officially, on members who took part in the disturbance earlier this month in Washington, D.C. At least two real estate professionals have been identified among the throngs who broke into the Capitol, smashing windows and doors and otherwise defiling the place.

One was a Frisco, Texas, broker who took a charter plane to D.C. to participate in the march, but lied to authorities about having gone inside the historic structure. Video showed her inside, and she had bragged on social media (since taken down) about breaking in.

According to a training webinar about recent changes to NAR’s code of ethics, what happened in the nation’s capital was not a violation unless it was directed at a protected class. “Merely being a participant in something that appears likely to involve criminal activity does not” cross the line, said Matt Difanis, chair of NAR’s Professional Standards Committee and a Champaign, Illinois, broker.

On the discrimination issue, meanwhile, Oppler said that his organization intends to “look the problem squarely in the eye” and assume a leadership role in fighting for fair housing going forward. In that regard, it has adopted an initiative it calls ACT: Accountability, Cultural Change and Training.

Among other things, NAR’s Fair Housing Action plan, which was approved a year ago, has created an interactive software program that should help agents identify and confront discriminatory situations.

In another step, NAR has amended its code of ethics to make it a violation to use harassing or hate speech toward any protected class: race, color, religion, sex, handicap, family status, national origin, sexual orientation and gender identity.

But while the simulation program has been received well, the code addition is getting pushback: Some members say it goes too far because it bans such speech anywhere, at any time. That, they say, impinges on their right to free speech.

“I don’t need any bureaucrat monitoring my speech,” a California agent complained on the ActiveRain real estate site.

“This rule applies to what someone does outside of their activities as a Realtor,” said an agent in South Carolina. Others agreed, calling the rule “overreach” and “foolish.”

There were more than a score of comments like these. But Oppler said he hasn’t received “one negative call” on the issue.

“We hold our members to a higher level,” Oppler told me during a telephone press briefing. “Our intent is to stop members from engaging in hate. It’s not positive for our industry.”

Meanwhile, four appraisal organizations have come together to tackle “unconscious” behavior in valuing properties. Unlike NAR, the groups did not admit that their members engaged in discriminatory practices. But “acknowledging that bias exists is but one small step,” Lorrie Beaumont, president of the 5,500-member American Society of Appraisers, said in a statement.

According to a 2018 report published by the American Sociological Association, racial composition is “inextricably linked” to housing appraisals. The study found that in Harris County, Texas, comparable houses in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods were “valued systematically lower” than in white communities.

And last August, according to a New York Times story, a mixed-race Florida couple suspected bias when an appraiser valued their house far less than neighboring properties. After the couple removed family photos and books by Black authors -- personal effects that would indicate a Black person lived there -- a second appraiser said the place was worth more than 40% more.

Sellers may not realize it, but the commissions they pay their real estate agents are split with the agents who bring the eventual buyer through the door. Even when that agent works solely on behalf of the buyer, they take a part of the selling agent’s fee. It’s an odd dynamic called “coupling.”

But depending on the outcome of three major lawsuits challenging commission structures in the real estate field, that could change -- for the better, according to one seasoned observer.

As Stephen Brobeck sees it, if the courts rule to require sellers to pay their agents and buyers to pay theirs -- in other words, uncouple the commission structure -- the fees agents charge will eventually decline. Not right away, perhaps, and maybe not by all that much. But Brobeck believes it will be enough to force “marginal” agents out of the business. Those agents’ clients would then gravitate to their more dominant colleagues, resulting in an increase in business that would more than make up for the somewhat lower commissions.

In the end, says Brobeck, consumers will be better off.

Brobeck has been on the real estate beat for a long time. In 1990, he was executive director of the Consumer Federation of America, a national organization of more than 250 state and local nonprofit consumer groups. In that role, he challenged the use of subagency: a practice in which all other agents are “subagents” of the listing agent.

Back then, the agent who drove prospects around from house to house was legally bound to pass along information that was disclosed to him or her, sometimes without telling the buyers. As a result of Brobeck’s work, at least in part, subagency was eventually abandoned -- replaced, unfortunately in some cases, by disclosures so nebulous as to be meaningless to most folks.

In 2019, Brobeck, who by then had stepped down as CEO of CFA to become a senior fellow with the group, shined a light on those terms, calling for states to rewrite disclosure laws so buyers and sellers can more easily determine for whom their agents work.

In that report, he found that states use more than 50 different terms to identify the roles agents can play in a transaction. For example, depending on the jurisdiction, a dual agent -- one who works for both the buyer and the seller, but has no fiduciary obligation to either -- might be known as a “limited consensual dual agent,” “dual representative,” “limited dual agent without assigned agency,” “standard dual representative,” “standard dual agent,” “dual-agency broker representing seller and buyer,” “broker representing both seller and buyer” or “multiple representative.”

Then last year, Brobeck wrote a report calling into question the use of ratings -- not just the ones found on agents’ websites, but also on listings aggregators like Yelp, Facebook or even realtor.com, the official listings service for the National Association of Realtors. Some ratings were paid for, he said, and some others were out-and-out fakes.

Now at age 76, Brobeck is at it again, this time with a critical look at how uncoupling would work. He admits that this change would require favorable rulings in cases brought in Illinois, Missouri and Massachusetts by some of the country’s largest and most successful class-action litigators. But these law firms “would not have brought these cases if they thought they stood little chance” of succeeding, he argues. And he notes that a federal judge in Illinois has already denied an NAR petition to dismiss a suit challenging structural “price-fixing,” making it “far more likely” that decoupling will eventually come to pass.

Here’s how Brobeck sees the results:

-- Lenders and investors in mortgages will work with agents to facilitate the transition. They will quickly accept the idea that each side of the sales transaction has its own representation and pays its own commission. Better yet, with affordability always a question mark, they will allow the buyer’s fee to be included in the loan amount, so there will be no extra out-of-pocket cost.

-- It could be “well over a year” for commission levels to start falling, and they may only fall to 2.5% or so. While there is no standard fee, the typical charge by listings agents these days is 6%, of which the agent landing the buyer takes half. So with decoupling, the buyer’s side would be just 0.5% lower.

-- Well-established agents will be “confident enough in their long-term success” to handle the revenue shortfall. But for marginal agents -- “perhaps as many as half of all licensees,” Brobeck ventures -- the pinch will be so great they will cease active practice.

-- Buyers and sellers who would have otherwise signed up with those now-inactive agents will gravitate toward more established professionals. “Overall,” Brobeck says, “clients will receive better customer service.”

-- Discount brokerages that offer only rudimentary services are likely to see increased business, though not by much. Most consumers want “effective personal service from a single agent,” so Brobeck thinks they will align themselves with “a professional who can guide and reassure them.”

-- “To a greater extent,” Brobeck concludes, “the industry will look like a profession, with well-established agents dealing with clients and their issues while delegating routine tasks to salaried administrative staff.”

One weekend last month, Ben Caballero happened by a block in Argyle, Texas, where four home builders had set up model homes. Both sides of the street were lined with cars.

Unfortunately, builders are so far behind in construction these days that anyone who signed a contract that weekend probably won’t be able to move into their new residences until late spring or early summer.

“Builders simply can’t build homes fast enough to meet the remarkable demand,” says Caballero, whose HomesUSA is the broker of record for dozens of builders in four of Texas’ biggest markets. And it’s not just happening in the Lone Star State, but everywhere.

Usually, sales and new home starts move almost in lockstep. But these are not normal times. In its latest poll, marketing and research firm Zonda found that 30% of builders reported taking “weeks longer” to start work. And 6% said they were “months” behind.

According to Robert Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders, by the middle of last year, sales outpaced the start of construction by the largest gap ever. By October, that record-breaking gap had widened even further. And by November, the count of sold-but-not-yet-started houses was up 69% from a year earlier.

“The gap is unprecedented,” says Dietz. “There is no comparable period in the data going back to 1963.”

Although new home sales slipped at bit in November, they were still 21% higher than a year ago, as demand continued to be supported by low interest rates, a renewed consumer focus on the importance of home, and rising interest in lower-density markets like suburbs and exurbs. On net, sales were up 19.1% for the first 11 months of 2020.

But starts have failed to keep pace. The spread between sales and starts is even greater than Census Bureau figures indicate, Dietz says, because the government’s count includes custom houses and those built specifically for rent.

Dietz indicates some slowing in sales is necessary, and believes builders may be pulling back a tad on taking new contracts until they can catch up. “Builders don’t want to get too far out over their skis,” he said in December.

That leaves the inventory of completed-but-unsold houses extremely low. Nationwide, the NAHB counts just 43,000 finished, ready-to-occupy houses nationwide.

Some builders have stopped selling altogether because they can’t keep up. Others are still selling, but they are raising their prices “aggressively,” Caballero reports -- in some cases, in an effort to slow sales.

According to Tim Sullivan at Zonda, at least two-thirds of the 18,000 subdivisions his company tracks have hiked prices. In September, price increases were nearly universal (94%) among projects in markets like Indianapolis, Phoenix, Denver, Raleigh, Tampa and Orlando.

That figure fell back a bit in October, the latest month for which the statistic is available. And, said Sullivan last month, “Prices are still increasing, but at a decreasing rate.”

But higher prices haven’t stopped people from looking, if not buying. Indeed, according to Zonda’s data, traffic also is at record levels. Sullivan adds: “Wait lists are back!”

Taking more deals than they can handle isn’t the only thing slowing builders down, though. They continue to face a number of headwinds, not the least of which are a lack of skilled labor and a lack of developed building sites.

But one of their main bugaboos these days is government services, or the lack thereof. Because of the virus, many local jurisdictions are operating on skeleton staffs. Some have reduced operating hours or closed some offices altogether. That means there’s nobody around to approve plans and make on-site inspections, among the myriad other services builders require.

At the same time, builders are concerned about their inability to obtain the products they put into their houses. According to BMC, a major supplier of building materials, it’s taking only slightly longer for such key items as wallboard, lumber, siding and doors, but “extended periods” for roofing, engineered wood, vinyl windows and door locks.

Two-thirds of the builders queried by Zonda were worried about their inability to get some products in a timely manner, and 53% said obtaining important government services is a problem. On top of that, prices for softwood lumber, a key building product, jumped nearly 50% between April and August -- the largest four-month gain since 1949.

Just 40% of builders said labor was an issue. And although there was no mention of a scarcity of lots on which to build, Sullivan reports that nationwide, the supply of construction-ready sites is down 9% from a year ago, while prices are up 5.6%. “Many markets are significantly undersupplied,” he says. “Availability is going down.”

Meanwhile, another big question mark is beginning to surface: appraisals. Sales are so far ahead of closings that valuations are lagging.

Until a house is finished and the buyer takes ownership, that sale can’t be used to support an appraisal on a new sale. Consequently, the appraisal could come in too low to secure the financing the next buyer is seeking. The result: They’ll either have to put more money down or walk away from the house they’re hoping to purchase.