The Plymouth County Board of Realtors and South Shore Association of Realtors are exploring the possibility of joining forces and becoming a single organization, officials acknowledged last week.

In a Feb. 18 memo to its members, South Shore President Joyce I. Baker of CityView Real Estate in Quincy said her group’s board of directors has been looking into an affiliation with the Plymouth board. An identical memo was sent to members of the Plymouth board.

“Nothing has been decided yet,” Baker said in an interview last week. “First, the idea has to be brought before the full membership, and we haven’t done that yet.”

According to the memo, action on a possible merger first came in November 1999 when the South Shore association formed a task force to meet with representatives from the Plymouth board to discuss the possibility of joining forces.

“We’re investigating the advantages to unifying the two boards,” Baker said. “We’re having ongoing meetings to discuss it, almost every week. We’ve been meeting for two months now, if not longer.”

Baker said the decision to look into merging was mutual. “The two incoming presidents both had this idea in the back of their minds,” she said, referring to herself and Donna Wood of MacDonald-Wood Real Estate in Duxbury, 2000 president of the Plymouth board. “It just seemed to make sense.”

One factor influencing the merger decision was the duplication of services available between the neighboring regional associations, Baker said. “It seemed there was a lot of duplication. With the two boards, it’s double everything,” she said.

Wood said the consolidation of local boards is a reflection of events at higher levels. “One of the things happening is the economy of scale … and the trend is toward consolidation of services. The trend nationally is that the number of Realtors is shrinking, and if it’s happening on the national level, it will eventually funnel down to the state and local level.”

Baker and Wood agreed that the two Realtor associations still have a lot of work ahead of them before completing a comprehensive merger proposal. “It’s amazing the amount of detail involved in putting together a merger,” she said.

The merger could take place later this year.

“If it does go through – and I don’t want to say that it will happen because it hasn’t been presented to the membership yet – we’re looking to have something in place by the fall,” Baker said.

In addition to providing similar services, Baker said both boards overlap geographically, and share many of the same characteristics.

Baker said the South Shore association has more than 650 members. The Plymouth board has about 900 members, according to Wood.

Louder Voice
While Realtors may belong to any state regional association, the South Shore Association of Realtors primarily serves Realtors in Quincy, Weymouth, Braintree, Canton and Randolph. Located just to the south, the Plymouth County Board of Realtors has members in communities such as Pembroke, Duxbury and Marshfield.

“Then you have Hingham, which is split,” Baker continued. “You see, there is a lot of overlap.”

In addition to lower costs because of combined services, Baker said another advantage to the merger would be a more powerful voice among the regional Realtor associations.

“Instead of two separate boards, if you have one board that has 1,500 members, it gives you a bigger voice,” she said, “but the reason we’re doing this is from the standpoint that it can benefit our members.

“We can provide more services if we’re combined, and we can provide less expensive services.”

Both Realtor organizations are already members of the Property Information Network multiple listing service, so there would be little conflicts associated with having to choose one board’s MLS over another, Wood said. South Shore and Plymouth shared an MLS – the Plymouth County MLS – before the emergence of Bay State MLS and MLS-PIN.

“We’re still struggling with the distinction between the MLS and the boards,” Wood said. “We provide services which no longer include the distribution of data on houses. Our function and energy had been focused on providing other services, such as forms, education and a voice in the legislature.” Those services could be provided more efficiently if the boards were merged, Wood and Baker said.

“Change can be energizing,” Wood said. “We’re here to improve the value of what our members are getting.”

Neither association has had a general membership meeting where the merger was discussed, and Baker said that will not happen until a definitive plan is put together for the Realtors to examine before providing comment. “We want to have all of the information together, right now [a general meeting] is a little premature,” she said, adding there have been no “adverse comments” from individual Realtors so far.

“Our feedback has been that some people have said ‘That’s a great idea,’ and others have said ‘What took you so long?'” Wood said.

“We are proceeding cautiously, but are optimistic our weekly meetings will result in an opportunity for an affiliation/merger that will benefit the SSAR and its members,” the memo stated.

Members of each organization were told they would likely receive another update on the merger as early as this week. “If talks continue to be successful, a proposal will come before the membership for approval,” the memo continued.

Baker would not speak about specific details surrounding the merger talks, but said more details would be released in about four weeks.