Nykia Wright wants to make NAR an association for ‘today and tomorrow’

For Nykia Wright, CEO of the National Association of Realtors, 2025 is going to be all about turning NAR into a trade association for the future while rebuilding relationships with members.

“NAR is really focused on rebuilding the association for today and tomorrow,” Wright told NAR members gathered in Boston Monday for the trade group’s board of directors’ meeting at the conclusion of the NAR NXT conference. “One thing is for certain, the industry is changing and we must lead and change with it.”

According to Wright, a large part of revamping NAR will include a focus on redefining the member experience. To rebuild these relationships and work to redefine the member experience, Wright said NAR will be consulting surveys and focus groups conducted at NAR NXT.

“Through the use of those surveys, we are going to understand a lot more about what people need on the ground, and meet them where they are and organize ourselves accordingly,” Wright said. “Certainly, we need to redefine our relationships with brokerages — large and small, public and private.”

Wright also told attendees that she would soon be announcing the hiring of a special adviser, whom she said will help her “turbocharge and add rocket fuel to getting around the country reestablishing those relationships.”

Partially fueling Wright’s desire to rebuild relationships with members comes from the recent “rumblings” to challenge the three-way membership agreement among local, state and national Realtor associations.

“We are here to make sure that those rumblings subside,“ she said, “because it is our duty to make sure that people understand what happens at the local level, the state level, the national level, and really make sure that people understand that there is no cannibalization of services, but it’s really working together to make things work.”

The rumblings that Wright referenced also include two antitrust lawsuits (Hardy and Muhammad) that were filed by brokers and are seeking class-action status. The suits allege that the requirement for all Realtors and brokers to be members of NAR, their state Realtor association and a local board of Realtors represents an antitrust violation.

In addition to these suits, the Alabama Association of Realtors sent a letter to NAR asking it to end the three-way agreement.

Although Wright did not offer any further discussion of the three-way agreement, she did mention that NAR was looking to rebuild its relationships with “partner organizations.”

“This is a very, very large ecosystem in residential and commercial real estate, and there are a lot of people in organizations that do things a lot better than the association,” Wright said. “We want to acknowledge that and leverage that.”

Like NAR president Kevin Sears, Wright also acknowledged that NAR’s budget will be tighter in the future if its commission lawsuit settlement agreement is approved later this month. Due to this, she said the trade group is looking at “repositioning” some of its 300-person staff to meet the association’s “ever-growing needs.”

Additionally, Wright said she wants to change the discussion surrounding the size of NAR’s leadership — which includes a board of directors consisting of nearly 1,000 members — to focus on the group’s “effectiveness.”

“It is our implicit and explicit oath to you all that we will continue to do that, so that we will make sure that people around the nation — consumers and Realtors and agents alike — understand our purpose, and make sure that people are not discussing negative narratives about us,” Wright said.

As part of this effort, Wright highlighted that NAR has recently hired its first chief human resources officer. It also has brought in a Washington, D.C.-based legal firm to complete a risk assessment of NAR’s current policies to determine if any of them pose future legal risks.

“Recently we’ve been taking each pitch as it comes and we have not been winning those ballgames,” Wright said. “What we want to do is look outside and see what those risks are, and understand how we can better manage and not be caught in the antitrust world again.”

The trade group expects to have findings back sometime in the next two months. It plans to use this information to help its governing body understand what it needs to do in the future to avoid further litigation over its rules.

As NAR and the real estate industry at large look to move beyond the past year, which Wright said was filled with “hiccups,” she asked the board and NAR members to help disseminate consumer guides that expalin the terms of NAR’s settlement and the associated business practice changes.

“Not only is it important for people to understand what are the results of the settlement, but when we were sitting across from the Department of Justice, it appeared that they were implicitly indicting us for not educating the consumer,” Wright said. “So, to the extent that you all can continue to hand out those guides, we don’t want to be sitting across from the government with that type of accusation in the future, even though we know internally what we do every single day.”

Wright’s address at NAR NXT came a little over a year after her one-year anniversary at the trade association. She was named as interim CEO in early November 2023 following the resignation of longtime CEO Bob Goldberg. NAR made things official with Wright in August, naming her as the trade group’s permanent CEO.