Greetings, Texas REALTORS® Family:
I pen this message knowing full well that by the time it’s published, our world will look as different from today as today looks from just two weeks ago when our Texas REALTORS® Leadership Team’s biggest challenge was leading a strategic planning session amid unprecedented social, professional, and financial abundance. Today, I pray for our military, first responders, and healthcare workers on the front lines. I pray by the time you read this, the worst is over, you and your loved ones are safe and healthy, and we are on a charted course to recovery.
Most of you will have spent the last weeks selflessly doing your share to mitigate the spread of disease and help your family and community meet urgent health and safety needs, because that is indeed “Who We R.” You will have bravely met the challenges of your profession as you sought to safely deliver its essential services to stunned and fearful consumers.
You will have bravely met the challenges of your profession as you sought to safely deliver its essential services to stunned and fearful consumers.
As you were, perhaps still are, fighting those battles on the home front, many of you partnered with your senior Leadership Team, Executive Board, regional vice presidents, governmental affairs directors, committee members, NAR, local association executives, and elected leaders, and stepped up for Texas like never before. A small but mighty army of more than 70 Texas REALTORS® staff members, led by Travis Kessler, mobilized as seamlessly as if it had been a routine fire drill. Operations were moved from our Austin headquarters to the private homes of our staff members with no noticeable disruption of services. Working around the clock, IT systems were built, forms promulgated, shelter-in-place spreadsheets prepared, countless meetings launched, daily website updates built and launched, and much more.
Your decades of advocacy and earned trust put your state and local leaders at the table of the early response conversations, and will ensure they remain in those seats throughout the coming recovery. Those TREPAC dollars you’ve been investing for all these years in an effort to elect state and local officials who share our commitment to private property rights served you well. In the 100-year existence of Texas REALTORS®, your place in the process of #ShapingTexas has never been more evident, nor critical.
On a personal note, let me just say how proud I am to be in this fight with you, serving next to Chairman-Elect Marvin Jolly, Secretary/Treasurer Russell Berry, our newest teammate, Marcus Phipps, who will be secretary/treasurer in 2021, and the one and only Travis Kessler. Our battle stations are manned on every front with the best and brightest. Texas REALTORS® will not rest until we see our state, our members, and the consumers we serve through this challenge and the epic recovery we know will follow.