Page 4 - NBIZ Magazine February 2024

Got Reputation?

By Leanne Hoagland-Smith, M.S.

E ach year, Gallup produces a poll related to ethics and honesty among

different professions. The most recent, released on January 22, 2024,
reflected the 2023 responses.
The headline read as follows: Ethics Ratings of Nearly All Professions Down
in U.S.
When people think about ethics and honesty, most will connect these two behav-
iors to reputation. Currently, the copycat class action lawsuits facing the National
®
Association of REALTOR (NAR), the state and local real estate associations, the
real estate brokerages, the Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) and individual licensed
real estate agents, are all about questioning the ethics and honesty, and the reputa-
tion of the person respective to commission and business practices.
For real estate agents, their reputation is on the line even if their brokerage has
not been included in this plethora of copycat class action lawsuits.
Beginning in 1977, Gallup has measured the ethics and honesty ranking of
real estate professionals by the general public. The ranking was segmented into
percentages of: Very High, High, Average, Low, Very Low, No Opinion, and then
grouped Very High with High.
Back in 1977, real estate agents ranked with 2, 13, 51, 24, 7, 3, and 15. Over
time, these rankings did experience smaller changes with December of 2018 show-
ing the highest gain of 2, 23, 54, 16, 4, 3, and 25. The following year the very high
ranking was 4, but the high ranking dropped by 3 points from 23 to 20.
Other professionals have been similarly tracked over the same time period.
What is interesting to note is that U.S. Senators in 2023 had no very high percent-
ages and the average general public perception ranking was 30%.
Stockbrokers also had average rankings that ranged between 46 and 59 over
that same time span. With combined rankings of very high and high, the profes-
sion with the highest ranking across all segments was nurses. This profession’s
combined rankings ranged from 78 to 89.

4 NBIZ ■ FEBRUARY 2024