Cooperation with the State
Cooperation with the State and National Association
Voting Rights and Privileges
As your association’s elected leader and spokesperson, you are responsible for keeping your membership informed of National Association policies, programs, and operations. However, you are also the voice of your membership and by casting your vote at the Delegate Body meeting you also convey the informed choice of your members regarding the policy decisions adopted by the National Association.
Delegates represent their member board prior to each meeting of the Delegate Body. Every board and state association is encouraged to send a delegate, who is either the President or his/her alternate who is a member in good standing of the board, to the REALTORS Annual Conference & Expo to vote at the Delegate Body Meeting. In order for delegates to be eligible to vote, an officer of his/her respective board must certify them. Board Officers have the option of certifying their delegate online via REALTOR.org or onsite. Delegates CANNOT certify themselves.
National REALTORS® Database System (NRDS)
The member and office records for the REALTOR® organization are updated on the NRDS system, an Internet-based database. The Points of Entry, which in most cases are the local associations and sometimes the state associations, are responsible for maintaining the records with their adds, drops, and changes. The state and national associations pull this data from NRDS on a regular basis so that all three levels of the organization use the same data for the member records.
Dues are due and owing from the local associations as of January 1 of each year. The National Association pulls the active counts from NRDS as of March 31 and compares them with the amounts received from the local associations to determine which associations are outstanding in their annual dues. It is up to the local association, or the association acting as their Point of Entry, to make sure all adds, drops, changes, etc. are current in the NRDS system, as they are the only ones who can update those member records. Members can also access their NRDS record on Realtor.org to update personal information such as home address, phone numbers, email address, web address, etc.
REALTOR® Ecommerce Network
Developed in 1999, the REALTOR® Ecommerce Network is a custom, proprietary ecommerce network from NAR available to all our associations to use free of charge. NAR created the interface and all the system programming so our associations would not have to take the costly step of creating a backend themselves. Included in the network are templates for annual dues billing and an online store for associations who do not have their own web sites. By setting up and hosting one network, NAR was able to contract with Verisign, Visa, MC, AMEX, Discover and Telecheck for rates our associations could not obtain on their own because collectively we have 1.2 million members. The total that ran through the Realtor Ecommerce Network for all our associations in 2008 was over $395 million.
