Real Estate VS REALTOR®Are You Committing A Crime?

REALTOR®  is not what you thought it was! Learn how the person selling Real estate is not always a REALTOR® and why

Real Estate and some Registered/ Trademarked terms, the whole story:

Hey everyone,

I have a great story to tell you today.

This story may actually stop some of you from committing a crime!

Doesn’t sound possible?

Well, stick around until the end because you may have a huge surprise.

Recently I started working on a video documentary.

This documentary was going to be narrated by someone that sounded exactly like Sir David Attenborough.

The documentary was going to focus on real estate agents.

How some still use newspapers to advertise, versus how they could use digital marketing instead and actually be able to measure results, and on top of that get 10 times more leads.

Anyway… We made a preview of the documentary, about 2 minutes long and launched it on YouTube, also shared it on the main page of our marketing site Prolific Zone, and after the first day, it already had over 500 views, and by the end of that week, it had surpassed 3500 views.

But, not all of those views were from people who thought the video was funny.

I received an email from the lawyers of (NAR) NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®

NAR explained to me (very nicely actually) that that word I used in both my titles and description was a Registered Mark, and that not all real estate agents are REALTORS®. Also, the word has to be spelled in all capital letters.

Well, if you know me before I believe anything I do research… and it is true.

Yes, that is correct, REALTORS® is not the name of the profession (Real Estate Agent) like most of us think (or thought)

It all started in very early 1900’s.  When NAR was called National Association of Real Estate Exchanges, then in 1916 became National Association of Real Estate Boards.

In 1950 the term REALTOR® Was approved as a registered mark by the US Patent and Trademark Office and is reserved exclusively for members of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® witch in 2004 surpassed for the first time 1 million members.

Those terms were created and are owned by an association and have to be used correctly.

For example, there is the situation of a domain squatter that bought 2000 domains with the term REALTOR® in them and added a geographical location to it, like San Francisco, or Washington, etc.

When asked to comply he thought it would be easier to fight it because he thinks this is a normal dictionary term and he has the right to use it!

Well… I can’t wait to see the end of that case.

So now you know.

Do not use the words REALTOR®, REALTORS® in the wrong way or not capitalized.

Here is the link to what you can and cant do

Here is the link to the Real Estate Agent video 

Remember to listen to the last episode here