Two hundred people decide.

Phoenix REALTORS has about ten thousand members. In a typical board election, somewhere around two hundred of them vote. The association told me that directly.

Two percent. Two percent of the membership chooses the people who sit in the room where the decisions get made.

I don't think that's apathy, exactly. I think most agents have never been shown what that room decides, so it reads like something that happens to other people. It isn't. Association boards weigh in on how listing data moves, what gets disclosed and when, which technology the membership is steered toward, what dues buy, and what the profession is going to say for itself while the ground keeps shifting underneath it.

Every one of those is a technology question now. Every one of them lands on your business inside eighteen months.

And two hundred people pick who gets to weigh in.

Twenty years in Arizona real estate. Designated Broker. I run an ADRE-licensed school, and I teach the classes myself.

I also run two brokerages — one on the REALTOR side, one that isn't. And here's the part worth saying out loud: the second one exists because this association backed opening MLS access to licensees who don't join. Phoenix REALTORS took that position when plenty of associations wouldn't have. I'm a direct beneficiary of a decision this board made, and I've watched it work from the inside of both models ever since.

That's not a small thing to me. It says this association would rather compete on being genuinely useful than on being the only door. That's the right instinct, it's already the culture here, and I wanted to help keep it pointed that way — because choice and competition are what make all of us better, and an association confident enough to allow both is the one that lasts.

The other half of what I'd bring is the part this newsletter is about. I'm not a software engineer. But since February I've spent thirty hours a week building the tools my agents use every day:

A comps tool wired straight into the MLS that returns a three-page report with its reasoning shown — not a number, an argument. It's become the one my agents reach for first. An inspection desk that reads the full inspection report and drafts the BINSR. Contract and counter drafting. Market stats. And an AI instructor that answers Arizona license law questions straight from the Law Book.

This association is already ahead of most on technology. Staying ahead is harder than getting there, and it needs somebody in the room who has built some of it. Not to be the AI person. To be the one who asks whether the thing actually works.

Two weeks earlier I wrote that the gap opening in this business isn't between agents who use AI and agents who don't — it's between the ones typing questions into it and the ones building things with it.

The same thing is true one level up.

Win or lose, I said this newsletter would go back the following Monday to being what it's always been — a broker telling you what he actually found. It did.

If you've got something you'd want a director to carry into that room, the offer stands whether I'm in it or not. Tell me and I'll carry it to someone who is.