NAR’s McMillan Ready to Represent

By Roger Cruzen

If you ever need evidence that the American Dream is alive and well in 2009, talk to Charles McMillan. •  He’ll tell you a story about how a preacher’s son raised on a tobacco and cotton farm in rural North Carolina with a high school diploma and an uncanny ability to connect with people rose from modest circumstances to become the first African-American elected to serve as president in the 100-year history of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION of REALTORS® (NAR). •  However, the significance of this milestone only rarely enters the conversation. “Organized real estate today is much more reflective of the world we live in, so I didn’t really experience any of the roadblocks others have told me about,” says this 58-year-old Texan from the Dallas-Ft. Worth suburb of Irving. “The REALTOR® organization has come an awful long way in the past 20 or 25 years.”

Not that his path to the presidency was paved with rose petals. McMillan’s real estate career has had its ups and downs, and his “circumstances” remain “modest” even today. But those who know him well say that’s just one more reason why McMillan is the ideal leader for the organization at a time when many REALTORS® are living from commission check to commission check.

“Here is a man who comes from the humblest beginnings but has an absolutely brilliant mind,” says one-time colleague and longtime friend Sherry Matina, a former REALTOR® who for the last 11 years has been CEO of the Greater Fort Worth Association of REALTORS®. “He’s the kind of person who can be handed a brief on a complicated issue in the morning and by the time he lands in D.C. will have digested it and be able to go nose to nose with any senator you put in front of him.”

Those skills already have been put to the test during his term as president-elect under Californian Dick Gaylord. It was then that NAR leadership pushed Congress to meet in a lame duck session to consider a four-point plan to improve the U.S. economy by sparking a more active real estate market and helping homeowners avoid foreclosure.

“I can tell you one thing: NAR is not sitting on the sidelines wringing our hands,” says McMillan. “We’re going to be involved on a daily basis with the [Obama] administration, Congress, and the various regulatory agencies, and we will continue to be very involved with the GSEs and with efforts to make permanent the prohibition against banks entering the real estate business. I’ve tried to keep my schedule clear in 2009 in anticipation of spending a lot of time in Washington.”

A Career Built on Education and Service

>> Like a lot of people who become leaders in real estate, Charles McMillan more or less fell into the business. When he was 12, his family moved to Florida, where he attended high school before returning to North Carolina. He tried college and dropped out only to be drafted into the Air Force during the Vietnam War. Dissatisfied with a series of dead-end jobs after he was discharged, he moved in 1978 to Texas. There, McMillan attempted to purchase a property and, due to some bad advice, lost his earnest money deposit. That led him to take the first in a series of real estate courses.

By 1983, McMillan had taken enough courses to qualify for the real estate licensing examination. Shortly thereafter, he joined a franchise brokerage as a sales associate and continued his real estate education, eventually earning GRI and CIPS designations and expanding into commercial and investment real estate, property management, and sales management and training. He also established a reputation as an effective and well-respected educator and expert on such topics as fair housing, antitrust, and agency. Today, McMillan is the broker of record and director of Realty Relations for Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Dallas-Ft. Worth, a 17-office firm with approximately 1,400 sales associates.

“Charles is very effective as a broker, and as a mentor and a trainer,” says Matina, “because he has a tremendous command of the details of the rules of doing business and knows the code of ethics backward and forward.”

Early on, McMillan says, his only contact with organized real estate was when he stopped by the real estate board office to pick up an MLS book.

“They had a pretty small staff, and one day I came into the office and found that the man who usually handed out the MLS books was sick, and they asked would I be willing to help,” he recalls. “After that, I got a couple of calls inviting me to serve on committees. Nothing is as effective as a personal invitation, and that’s what got me started.”

That was 1985. Dozens of local, state, and national committee chairmanships later, McMillan was breaking down racial barriers by taking on leadership roles as head of the Young Council of REALTORS®, as the first African-American president of the Greater Fort Worth Association in 1991, and, in 1998, as president of the Texas Association of REALTORS®.

Over the years, McMillan’s skills as an orator and his commitment to serving the REALTOR® have garnered him recognition.

“I compare him to [the late Texas congresswoman] Barbara Jordan,” says Matina. “Charles has that kind of commanding voice. When he gets rolling, there’s nobody who is not listening. In fact, my one frustration for him in this life is that he was never able to attend law school, because he would have been a great lawyer. I would trust him to argue any case before the Supreme Court—that’s how good he is at understanding and articulating issues.”

In addition to being an effective spokesperson for REALTORS® everywhere, McMillan says he hopes his presidency will inspire and empower young REALTORS®, regardless of their background, to accept the invitation to serve the REALTOR® family.

“Almost 40 percent of our members have been in the business less than seven or eight years, and many of them are applying technology and business management skills in ways our industry never conceived of,” McMillan explains. “Today’s top producers are 20 or 30 years younger than the previous generation and are producing numbers that dwarf many companies. Those of us from the ‘old school’ need to mentor these young professionals, none of whom have experienced the kind of market conditions we are seeing in 2009.”

McMillan believes it also is critical that this new generation of REALTORS® is invited to take a leadership role.

Sherry Matina agrees: “I told Charles that there are a lot of young REALTORS® out there looking to see how you handle this, because that will determine how they look at the REALTOR® organization and affect how they think about their careers in real estate. The greatest gift that both Dick Gaylord and Charles McMillan have given has been to reach out to these young people and say, ‘I want you here and I need you to be included.’”

Stats

Gadget You Can’t Live Without: My PDA

Career Outside of Real Estate You Would Have Chosen: Lawyer

Favorite Web site: Google.com

Current Read: The Course of Human Events or Blue Sky Thinking: 10 Ideas That Changed the Course of History

Actor Who Would Play Me: Forest Whitaker

Favorite Quote: “And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. Don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn’t do it any better. If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Roger Cruzen is a freelance writer.