Rounding NAR Membership at the Expense of Transparency

We are excited to announce that Jonathan Miller, who has long authored the most authoritative report on the residential real estate market, is partnering with The Real Deal. Below, you’ll find his Housing Notes column, which will now run on our site several times a week. In addition, Miller’s quarterly report for New York City, which he published through Douglas Elliman for more than three decades, will now be “The Real Deal report, prepared by Jonathan Miller.” Miller’s data venture, Streetmatrix, which provides hyperlocal data, will provide statistics to TRD Data subscribers.

— TRD editors

Rounding NAR membership at the expense of transparency

Last fall, I created the above visual for my post, “The NAR Membership Collapse Is Only Beginning,” because I was irritated that they stopped being transparent about their membership numbers. Membership peaked in October 2022 at 1,600,886 but has been declining consistently since then. For budgetary purposes and their new lease on life post-NAR settlement, NAR’s membership was forecast to drop to 1,200,000 over the next three years. Last fall, I made a visual to forecast their 2026-2028 growth by averaging the three years, so that 2027 (year 2) would have 1,200,000 members, as used in their own release and bottom out at 1,000,000 in 2028.

Reducing transparency has invited media coverage

By scrubbing their website of membership data in 2024, NAR has invited scrutiny each spring when they release the data, creating an annual media event. This year, the Wall Street Journal covered it: Real Estate Agents Are Quitting the Slow Housing Market.

Using the data presented in the Journal story’s chart, there is an interesting amount of rounding going on, based on the text in the story, and I suspect it was done to “round-up” so they could say the numbers are at 1.4 million instead of 1.3 million-plus. This year’s results are likely to be rounded, since we know the actual peak of 1.6 million mentioned in 2022 was also rounded from 1,600,886.

The National Association of Realtors had 1.4 million members as of April, down from a peak of 1.6 million in October 2022.

Using my earlier chart above, last fall I forecasted for this time, a number just below the 1.4 million threshold, probably north of 1.35 million but less than 1.4 million

Splitting hairs on membership counting precision

It is fair to say that the real estate industry is quite upset with NAR’s extracurricular toxic culture and the lack of foresight that led to the NAR settlement, and the millions of dollars it cost many real estate brokerage firms. That settlement was expensive and incomplete. NAR agreed to pay about $418 million over four years to resolve major seller class actions, but overall settlements connected to NAR and co‑defendants now exceed $1 billion, and some buyer-side and related actions are still ongoing.

To get out of this jam, NAR rolled out a 2026–2028 Strategic Plan built around two pillars: “building the future member experience” and “modernizing the association,” to transform the organization after the settlement and culture scandals. There was little said about how NAR will change the decision‑making culture that failed to anticipate or mitigate antitrust risk, or about the internal toxic culture issues that made national headlines. Their toxic culture was widely known within the industry and adjacent industries.

So when I see this subtle charade of membership numbers being played for very little potential public relations upside, it looks like no leadership lessons have been learned and little, if anything, has changed within the organization. I am only doing this through my narrow analytical window, but the reduction of transparency is noticeable and disappointing to me at the same time.

Final thoughts

NAR’s membership decline is tracking my earlier forecasts, indicating a predictable pattern reset rather than a cyclical dip. Removing regular membership disclosure has turned updates into media events, increasing scrutiny, while the use of rounded figures raises credibility concerns that they seem to be unaware of. More broadly, the concern extends beyond shrinking membership to weakened trust about transparency and meaningful organizational change.

The actual final thought – Little challenges in life keep coming at you.

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