Marking PAR’s 100th Anniversary: Past President Bob Hay

Editor’s note: The Pennsylvania Association of Realtors® is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. As part of our Member Profile feature, we’ll be highlighting some of the Realtors® who have served as president of the organization.

Name: Bob Hay
Company: Keller Williams Real Estate, Stroudsburg
Years in real estate: 44 years
Local association: Greater Lehigh Valley Realtors®
Year served: 2008 president

If you could go back in time, what advice would you give your younger self?
If I could go back some years, I probably would have considered going up through the chairs at PAR a little sooner. I was a little older when I served in leadership than a lot of other people. I might have looked at doing that sooner. But I’m happy that I’m in my 44th year in the real estate business and that I’ve had the successes that I’ve had. I found my time serving at PAR and working up through the chairs over those years to be very gratifying and so looking back, I don’t know that I would change a whole lot.

Why should agents get involved in their local, state and national associations?
I got involved, myself, in the local association probably about the second year that I was in business, around 1977. I found it very rewarding, because I was at the table and working with committees within the local association, making decisions that affect Realtors® and affect our clients as well. Then I continued to get involved with PAR. I always felt that I wanted to give something back to the profession, not just taking out of it. I wanted to help make the profession better, help make the profession more educated, that’s really what I looked to do, so that’s why I got involved with PAR. And, of course, the side aspect of being involved is that you meet so many good people and those relationships can provide you with referrals across the state as well as the country when you’re involved at NAR.

What advice would you give someone who was thinking of moving up through the offices in PAR?
My main recommendation for someone who wants to move up through the chairs is get involved with a lot of different committees. You understand the workings of PAR because there’s a lot more to it than sitting on one committee and saying, “Well, I know this and this is what I specialized in.” As you move up through the chairs, you need to know the whole workings of PAR and the committees that are involved and what they mean to the association, to the membership and to the public.

What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in the real estate market since you started?
The biggest change has been technology. I go back to 1976 when I started and we didn’t have computers, we didn’t use lock boxes and we had a loose-leaf notebook for the MLS. We have come so far, but I would say that probably in the last 10 years, there has been a huge change in technology. Agents and Realtors® really need to grasp the technology part of it if they want to be successful in the future and stay part of the transaction.

Do you think the environment or technology will have a bigger impact on real estate in the next 100 years?
Looking out over the next 100 years, technology is going to continue to change and we have control of that to some degree because we can keep learning it and we need to keep learning it. But I think the environment is going to make a much bigger impact. I think that’s because there are things about the environment that we can’t change. We need to start working now to think about climate change and what effect that has on real estate. I think the environment, whether it’s in an area such as the Northeast, or whether it’s across the country, the environment is something that we do have to look at and I think that can be one of the biggest changes we see.