The Calgary Real Estate Board is a non-profit, voluntary membership organization with more than 5,500 licensed brokers and associates. A non-profit organization formed to serve the more than five thousand real estate professions in Canada is the Calgary Real Estate Board. The Calgary Real Estate Board is a voluntary membership-fee based organization. The goal of the Board is to provide assistance, including the MLS (Multi-List Service) to their members and clients. The MLS is an important tool used in the buying and selling of real estate.
Orignating in the early 1920s, The Calgary Real Estate Board was registered in March 1929 in accordance to the Statutes of Alberta. Throughout the 1930’s and until the early 1940’s the group was fairly dormant, when Mr. Kennett Lyle sought to revive the board in hopes of better serving its members and to further promote the real estate business. At that present time, there were no other professional groups for real estate agents. At the first reorganization meeting, Mr. Clair J. Cote, Sr. was elected chairman and Kennett Lyle became secretary. The board also put together 5 committee members to rewrite the organization’s constitution. They also set a membership fee schedule, $5 for active members and $2 for an associate membership.
Although the MLS is their primary mission, the Calgary Real Estate Board also serves to provide the public and agents with up to date info on buying and selling real estate. One venue they use is their weekly publication, Real Estate News. This magazine combined with their monthly ‘Home to Home’ publication provides the general public with an extensive overview of the real estate market along with many in-depth and educational articles.
The Calgary Real Estate Board lists on their MLS more than 90% of the properties available in the Calgary and surrounding areas. This wide coverage allows the seller greater exposure and the buyers more choices, conveniently located in one state-of-the-art system. By representing more than 260 member offices, the Calgary Real Estate Board is able to quickly put buyers and sellers together.
Another mission of the Calgary Real Estate Board is to apprise members of current trends in the real estate market and overall economy. Recently, the Calgary Real Estate Board forecasts that prices for single family homes would see a drop this year as price trends have stabilized. The board has indicated that this recent trend will cause a drop of as much as $10,000 on an average selling price. This could ignite the market that has remained slightly stagnant the past 6 months. However, the Calgary Real Estate Board does not expect this drop to last too long. Their predictions for a 10% increase in home prices are expected to occur in early 2010.