Closing The Hundred Year Gap
- Trisha Roy
- Feb 27
- 5 min read
When the National Association of Realtors was founded in the United States on May 12, 1908, it helped professionalize a young industry by unifying practitioners around ethics, advocacy, and shared standards.
A century later, NAR-India emerged in 2008 with a parallel mission: to elevate professionalism, transparency, and education for real estate transaction advisors across one of the world’s fastest-scaling property markets.
That “hundred-year gap” is not merely about dates. It reflects what each market required at its moment of formation—and how a younger organization can sometimes advance faster by learning from earlier models while leveraging modern technology.
A younger association, built for a digital era.
NAR-India positions itself as a nonprofit collective voice for REALTORS® in India, focused on high standards, accreditation, and professional development. Launching in the 21st century has allowed its education systems and market infrastructure to be designed digital-first—from mobile learning to data-driven practice.
Within just eight years of its founding, NAR-India actively collaborated with government stakeholders during the creation of India’s Real Estate Regulation and Development Act (RERA), helping shape a nationwide regulatory framework for transparency and accountability.
By contrast, the U.S. market spent much of its first century wrestling internally with inconsistent licensing, fragmented oversight, and deeply rooted fair-housing challenges. Although the Fair Housing Act was ultimately passed in 1968—nearly sixty years after NAR’s founding—issues of equity and enforcement continue to surface. Licensing evolved state by state, producing a patchwork system that took decades to stabilize. Even in recent years, professionals have had to navigate legislation that conflicts with fair-housing principles, forcing brokers to seek compliance workarounds to avoid liability.
India, meanwhile, maintains a clear national policy on ownership: direct foreign purchase of residential real estate is not permitted unless the buyer is of Indian origin (OCI) or acquires property through inheritance. This centralized stance provides regulatory clarity and limits speculative foreign entry.
Education that scales across cities and career stages
NAR-India has invested heavily in structured education pathways, including programs aligned with globally recognized coursework such as CRS and IREM. It also supports regulator-aligned training, including MahaRERA-authorized instruction for the Estate Agent Certificate of Competency—directly linking professionalism to compliance.
Here, a “late start” becomes an advantage. Credentialing frameworks can be built around today’s consumer expectations: documentation discipline, transaction transparency, and cross-border competence—rather than retrofitted after the fact.
Technology infrastructure: toward organized, transparent data
One of the defining differences between mature and emerging real estate markets is standardized listing data. In the U.S., MLS systems have long served as the backbone of cooperation and market transparency. India’s market was historically fragmented—but that is changing.
What began as a July 2024 brunch conversation between Tarun Bhatia, Global Ambassador of India, and author Trisha Roy ultimately led to a Memorandum of Understanding between NAR-India and Universal Consulting (an affiliate of Stellar MLS), initiating India’s Multiple Listing Service journey.
By 2025, NAR-India and its partners launched India’s first MLS pilot in Mumbai—an important step toward structured data and professional interoperability.
MLS infrastructure delivers compounding benefits: stronger comparables, clearer days-on-market signals, standardized listing fields, and fewer information asymmetries between professionals and consumers.
In short, the gap is closing not by copying the past, but by adopting proven frameworks—and accelerating them with modern technology.
India’s built environment: world-standard quality and amenities
Across major metros, India increasingly delivers projects that meet global benchmarks: integrated townships, managed communities, lifestyle amenities, and service-rich residential formats. The organized real estate footprint in top cities is projected to expand significantly through 2030, driven by sustained demand across residential, commercial, and mixed-use sectors.
This trajectory aligns with broader macroeconomic forecasts that place real estate as a major contributor to India’s long-term growth.
Quality, however, is multidimensional. The U.S. traditionally leads in inspection protocols, disclosure norms, and mature property management systems. India often leads in new-build velocity, master-planned developments, and amenity-forward design. Increasing formalization is transforming the comparison from “ahead versus behind” into one of complementary strengths.
Values and governance: Unity in Diversity
India’s real estate ecosystem is inherently plural—spanning languages, regions, customs, and micro-markets. An association that can remain agile while uniting this diversity gains a strategic edge: it can establish shared standards without erasing local nuance.
Here, “Unity in Diversity” becomes operational governance. By prioritizing education, ethics, and consumer trust over factionalism, NAR-India is building a platform capable of national scale.
Healthy associations thrive on cooperation: clear standards, fair representation, and transparent leadership pathways. That culture is cultivated through credentialing, conferences, and consistent professional expectations.
NAR-India
A comparative snapshot: U.S. and India
At a high level—acknowledging excellence and uneven practice in both markets—the contrast is instructive:
Licensing:
In the United States, real estate licensing is regulated at the state level. Each of the 50 states maintains its own licensing authority, education requirements, examination standards, continuing education mandates, and disciplinary procedures. While many states offer reciprocity agreements, there is no single national real estate license. As a result, professionals operating across state lines must navigate varying statutory frameworks, compliance rules, and renewal cycles. This decentralized system reflects the federal structure of U.S. governance but can create complexity for mobility and uniformity of standards.
By contrast, NAR-India has articulated a forward-looking “One Nation, One License” vision—an initiative aimed at promoting standardized professional qualifications and regulatory consistency across India’s states. In a country of immense geographic and cultural diversity, such harmonization would represent a structural leap toward national uniformity in practice standards. While implementation requires coordination with governmental and regulatory authorities, the conceptual framework itself signals a commitment to clarity, portability, and consumer protection. Where the U.S. model emphasizes state sovereignty, India’s emerging approach reflects an effort to align professional mobility with a unified national market.
Professional standards
The U.S. benefits from mature MLS systems, established disclosure culture, and state-level licensing. India is rapidly formalizing through RERA frameworks, structured education, and emerging MLS infrastructure.
Takeaway: the U.S. leads in legacy systems; India is professionalizing at scale—often faster than mature markets can reform.
Technology
The U.S. refines within a dense PropTech ecosystem. India leapfrogs through mobile-first adoption, digital identity, and accelerating transaction platforms.
Industry growth
The U.S. is a large, cyclical, mature market. India’s growth curve remains steep, fueled by urbanization, infrastructure, and expanding organized development.
Closing the gap—without copying the past
The hundred-year difference can be reframed as an advantage. NAR-India began after the global industry had already learned what works: ethics, education, and market infrastructure. Armed with modern tools—digital learning, credentialing pathways, and MLS formation—it can compress decades of evolution into a shorter runway.
Ultimately, the real metric is not organizational size. It is consumer trust: clearer agency practice, better-trained professionals, reduced information gaps, and faster dispute resolution.
That is how a century-long gap is closed—not through imitation, but by building a forward-looking professional culture that is agile, inclusive, and strong enough to serve a diverse nation at global scale.
As NAR-India continues its rapid evolution, it holds a uniquely symbolic position within National Association of Realtors’s global network. While NAR maintains bilateral partnerships with multiple countries, NAR-India stands alone as the only partner organization formally carrying the REALTOR® trade name—a distinction that reflects both trust and alignment with NAR’s professional standards. That relationship is further underscored by market reality: India now represents the fourth-largest group of international buyers in NAR’s annual International Residential Real Estate Activity study in the United States. Together, these facts highlight more than collaboration—they signal India’s growing influence on global residential real estate and affirm NAR-India’s role as a bridge between two powerful markets, helping shape a future defined by professionalism, transparency, and cross-border opportunity.
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