Recognize the REALTORS® Your Committee Hasn't Met Yet

A 30-minute session for REALTOR® associations on award criteria and judging that open the door to every member, not only the ones already in the room.

REALTOR® awards have no national rulebook. As of 2026, NAR leaves the criteria for REALTOR® of the Year entirely to each state association, and three of its six suggested categories are association activity: local, state and national.

That's a fair way to honor service to the profession. It also means the agents most likely to win are often the ones who have served on the most committees for the longest time.

This session is built around two of the five dimensions of Review Integrity, a framework for judging whether an application and review process is fair, consistent and defensible.

The first is Rubric Clarity: are criteria written, weighted and visible before anyone is nominated? When members can't see how winners are chosen, many assume they already know the answer.

The second is Reviewer Calibration: are judges trained, are conflicts enforced, and is scoring consistent? In a REALTOR® association, that includes committee members judging agents from their own brokerage, or a competitor's.

Past winners earned their awards. But when the same names keep winning, newer agents, agents at smaller brokerages and agents whose service happens outside association committees stop nominating anyone, including themselves. The pool shrinks, and the program starts to look like it depends on who you know.

Who gets nominated is decided long before the committee meets. The categories, criteria and nomination forms you publish shape the pool before the first nomination arrives.

In this 30-minute session, you'll learn how to:

• Publish your criteria, and how each one is weighted, before nominations open
• Write award categories that recognize community service and business excellence, not just association tenure
• Let members nominate themselves or a colleague, and collect letters of support automatically
• Verify membership and eligibility up front, so no one has to check by hand
• Assign judges so no one scores a nominee from their own brokerage
• Give every judge the same weighted scorecard, and see when one judge scores much harder than the rest
• Keep a record of how each winner was chosen, in case a member asks
• Run REALTOR® of the Year, Rookie of the Year, Good Neighbor and every other award on one platform, and clone each one for next year

Who should attend

REALTOR® association executives, staff and awards committee chairs at local and state associations who run member awards and recognition programs.

Can't make it live? Register anyway and we'll send you the recording.