Fair Housing Action Plan: ACT!

ACT! is NAR’s cornerstone fair housing initiative supporting Accountability, Culture Change, and Training to advance fair housing across our industry. NAR provides resources and tools to our members, brokerages, and associations to implement ACT! on the state and local levels. ACT! accelerates the delivery of innovative training to REALTORS® and promotes fair-housing-oriented culture-change that is necessary for the profession to serve an increasingly diverse nation.

In the summer of 2019, NAR established a new Fair Housing Policy Committee to advocate more effectively on national fair housing policy. NAR also hired Bryan Greene as its Director of Fair Housing Policy, now the Vice President of Policy Advocacy. Bryan Greene served at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for 29 years, where he was the top career official overseeing enforcement of the federal Fair Housing Act.

In the fall of 2019, the New York Newsday investigation, Long Island Divided, was published underscoring the need for NAR to further ramp up and reinvigorate its fair housing commitment.

In January of 2020, the leadership of the National Association of REALTORS® met in Washington and unanimously passed the Fair Housing Action Plan (ACT!) which distinguish NAR as a national industry leader on fair housing.

Immediately following the passage of the new Fair Housing Action Plan, the Leadership Team met with the HUD Secretary, whom they briefed on the plan, and who agreed to join NAR in a joint public service campaign to advance our shared fair housing goals.

In the first year of ACT!, NAR launched Fairhaven, a fair housing simulation; Bias Override, a new implicit bias classroom course nationwide; expanded NAR’s voluntary self-testing program for brokerages; conducted analysis on state licensure law fair housing requirements; created a REALTOR® fair housing champion award, and engaging with fair housing legal experts to provide analysis on a range of fair housing issues.