Ethical Homes

“Realtor®” is actually an invented word, created by the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) in 1916 as a way to distinguish their members from other non-member real estate agents. In order to emphasize that distinction, the NAREB trademarked the word, and later renamed themselves as the National Association of Realtors (NAR). One of the requirements that the NAR has for all of its members, then, is that we help them avoid trademark dilution (the process by which trademarked words become generic terms, like “kleenex” and “xerox” and “post-it”) by putting the ® symbol after the word. (Technically, we’re actually supposed to write the word in ALL CAPS and use the symbol after every instance of the word (i.e. “REALTOR®”); thankfully, NAR isn’t as anal as some other trademark holders, and so they allow Realtors to use more traditional capitalization and to only use the ® after the first instance of the word in a particular text if doing otherwise would be unwieldy.