‘Sherry Chris Joins National Association of REALTORS® as Independent Consultant and Special Advisor to CEO Nykia Wright.’ In case you missed it (ICYMI), it is now a new year. How will 2025 differ from 2024? Time will tell, but here in MHVille – the diminished version of the once far greater manufactured home industry experienced in the mid-to-late 199os – it seems that many ‘official’ sources often ignore much of the history of the once more potent and muscular manufactured housing industry. If that sounds like testosterone is a thing, well it should be, lest humanity fail in its current form that has existed since the origins of humanity.  But to pivot towards the headline topics that include the suggested need to compare what the National Association of Realtors (NAR) has provided to MHProNews vs. what the Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI) has in recent years, hang on. Because it isn’t just the Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform (MHARR) that acts with far greater transparency than MHI. There is an evidence-based argument to be made that NAR behaves more transparently too. Part I of today’s report was provided by Troy Green.

Troy Green is the Director of Media Communications for the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR). With a simple email, MHProNews was placed on their press release list. When a question arises, MHProNews can contact Green – or MHARR for that matter – and reliably count on a timely response. MHProNews can contact a federal agency and routinely get a timely response, with the occasional exception of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Office of Manufactured Housing Programs (OMHP). That is another story for another time, because HUD, per MHI’s website is “Celebrating 50 years of Partnership with HUD.” Memo to MHI staff and board members. Kindly keep that on your website for the balance of 2025. It speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

Part II will provide some relevant news, updates, and the headline promised comparisons (comps) between NAR, MHARR and MHI. It will include a reference to another NAR team member who made several requested corrections in a document she had produced with MHI’s input that had errors including on the historic date: June 15, 1976. With that brief tease, here is Green’s press release for NAR about Sherry Chris, her bio in brief, and what NAR says she will be doing for that trade group.

 

Part I

Sherry Chris Joins National Association of REALTORS^® as Independent Consultant and Special Advisor to CEO Nykia Wright

CHICAGO (January 6, 2025) – The National Association of REALTORS^® (NAR) today announced it has engaged industry veteran Sherry Chris as an independent consultant and special advisor to NAR CEO Nykia Wright. In this role, Chris will provide strategic counsel on strengthening relationships, building trust and enhancing collaboration with brokerage leaders.

“Sherry brings unmatched expertise and a unique, well-informed perspective on the real estate brokerage landscape, which will be critical as we enhance NAR’s collaboration with industry partners and drive stronger alignment across the sector,” said Wright. “Her ability to build meaningful connections and offer forward-thinking perspectives will help guide NAR’s approach to meeting the complex and varied needs of the real estate community.”

Chris brings a wealth of experience and proven leadership to this new advisory position. She is an 18-year veteran of Anywhere Real Estate Inc., where she most recently served as Executive Advisor. Previously, she was the CEO of Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate (BHGRE) and ERA Real Estate and earlier as COO for Coldwell Banker Real Estate.

Chris is widely regarded for her success in guiding the BHGRE and ERA brands’ strategic growth, franchise sales and marketing innovation, and mentoring new generations of real estate leaders. Under her leadership, BHGRE grew significantly across over 40 U.S. states and six countries and established a unique position as real estate’s lifestyle brand. ERA saw similar growth during Chris’ tenure, expanding its reach to 43 U.S. states and 34 countries.

“Having known Sherry for nearly a decade, I know firsthand that she is well equipped to provide the kind of leadership and insight that comes from years of experience, rising the ranks from a practitioner to a branch and regional manager and finally as a leader at the helm of several major brokerages and brands – a unique perspective that speaks to the diverse needs of our members,” said Kevin Sears, President of NAR. “Her extensive leadership experience with brokerages both large and small provides her with a nuanced understanding of the challenges and opportunities across the industry. Sherry’s ability to build relationships and foster collaboration will be instrumental in strengthening connections and ensuring NAR remains a trusted partner for the entire real estate community.”

In addition to her C-Suite roles, Chris has been deeply engaged with the real estate industry’s most impactful member and advocacy organizations, including NAR’s Real Estate Services Advisory Group, where she previously held the role of board Chair, and The Realty Alliance, for which she served as its first female board chair. She is also a founding corporate member of the LGBTQ+ Real Estate Alliance. She is also a member of the Asian Real Estate Association of America and a past board member of its education foundation.

For her many contributions to the industry, Chris was inducted into the RISMedia Newsmakers Hall of Fame in 2021, and she is regularly recognized as one of Inman’s 100 Most Influential Real Estate Leaders. Chris has also been recognized as a HousingWire Woman of Influence (2021), a leader in the Swanepoel Power 200 list, a Luminary in RISMedia‘s Newsmakers list, an industry Gamechanger by RealTrends, one of the Most Influential Real Estate Executives by Real Estate Executive Magazine, and a member of Diversity Journal‘s Diversity Leader Women Worth Watching lists.

Chris’ limited scope as part of her advisory role to NAR will include working closely with Wright to engage one-on-one with brokerage leaders, soliciting their needs, concerns and perspectives on the future of the industry. Their outreach will focus on fostering open dialogue and identifying opportunities for NAR to better support brokerages and their agents.

“I am honored to work alongside Nykia and the leadership team at NAR during such an important time for our industry,” said Chris. “My goal is to better understand the concerns and priorities of brokerage leaders across the country and help create solutions that drive trust, value and collaboration for the very many important stakeholders in real estate.”

About the National Association of Realtors^®

As America’s largest trade association, the National Association of Realtors^® is involved in all aspects of residential and commercial real estate. The term Realtor^® is a registered collective membership mark that identifies a real estate professional who is a member of the National Association of Realtors^® and subscribes to its strict Code of Ethics. For free consumer guides about navigating the homebuying and selling transaction processes – from written buyer agreements to negotiating compensation – visit facts.realtor.

—

Information about NAR is available at nar.realtor. This and other news releases are posted in the newsroom at nar.realtor/newsroom.

 

Part II – Additional Information with More MHProNews Analysis and Commentary

In no particular order of importance consider the following observations.

1) NAR’s bold footer note seen at the end of Part I says: “Information about NAR is available at nar.realtor. This and other news releases are posted in the newsroom at nar.realtor/newsroom.” That is true for the public at large, or for news outlets like MHProNews. By contrast, MHI has adopted what has been referred to as ‘Orwellian communications’ and publicly facing record keeping methodology.

 

More on MHI shortly.

2) It took precisely 11 minutes this morning for MHProNews to have two responses from NAR’s Troy Green. One of those requests was for the official photo of NAR CEO Nykia Wright shown in today’s featured image for this report.

3) It is natural to expect an organization to attempt to put its ‘best foot forward’ and frame their own image in as positive a fashion as possible. That noted, when MHProNews contacted Scholastica “Gay” Cororaton about apparent errors in the initially posted version of her report on manufactured housing. The engagement with Cororaton was professional, timely, and resulted in corrections on each and every documented topic raised by this publication. Cororaton and NAR went a few steps further. She apparently requested and had that entire issue Realtor University’s Center for the Journal of Real Estate Studies pulled that the error-impacted article was in, and it was replaced with a new version that had the corrections in it. That’s quite in keeping with the kind of standards described by the Society of Professional Journalism Code of Ethical Conduct.

From the link here is the following.

THE MARKET FOR MANUFACTURED HOMES
Scholastica (Gay) D. Cororaton, CBE

“Compared with the unregulated mobile/trailer homes of the past, the manufactured homes built after 1976 have a higher level of safety, durability, and quality, and the small fraction of homes damaged during hurricanes attests to their safety and durability.”

–   Scholastica “Gay” D. Cororaton,
Certified Business Economist (CBE),
National Association of Realtors ® (NAR).

Cororaton correctly noted that “the small fraction of homes damaged during hurricanes attests to their safety and durability.”

“New design features and multi-section homes are increasingly giving them the look of traditional site-built homes. These safety standards and improved features should lead to the increasing acceptance of manufactured homes as a safe, durable, and affordable type of housing,” said Cororaton, in a recent 30-page report by NAR’s Realtor University ®, entitled, the “The Market for Manufactured Homes.”

The corrected version of Cororaton’s research is found at this link here. It includes in footnote 1 on the first page of her research the following.

The views and findings in this report are those of the author and should not be attributed to nor viewed as a policy of the National Association
of Realtors®. The author thanks Dr. Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President, Research, NAR, for initiating this study; Jenny
Hodge, Vice President – Research & Market Analysis, Kara Beigay, Senior Director of Government Affairs, and Marc Lifset, Consultant, of the
Manufactured Housing Institute for their invaluable comments on the earlier draft and industry insights; Dr. Paul Bishop, Vice President, Research
and Ken Fears, Senior Policy Representative, Public Policy Analytics, NAR, and Caroline Van Hollen, Manager, Strategic Planning, for their
thorough review and comments on the earlier draft. The author also thanks L.A. “’Tony” Kovach, Publisher, MH Living News and MH Pro News;
Mark Weiss, President & CEO, Manufactured Housing Association for Regulatory Reform…for their insights and comments on the report.

All errors are to be attributed to the author.

4)  Jenny Hodge was listed as “Jenny Hodge, Vice President – Research & Market Analysis” for MHI. But she too is in the apparently growing list of “unperson’s” who have been given the Orwellian memory hole treatment. Why is that so? Kara Beigay was listed as Senior Director of Government Affairs. Marc J. Lifset is an attorney in the firm McGlinchey Stafford. Lifset’s name is available today on the MHI website. Tomorrow, or a year from now if no changes occur in how MHI operates, who knows? But on 1.6.2025, Marc Lifset is available in a search of the MHI, but only to MHI members. Is Lifset a secret agent? Someone who MHI thinks is so lofty that one has to be ‘a member’ to be able to see what MHI says about him?

 

 

 

Jenny Hodge was an MHI vice president for several years. Per sources, there was a polite tension between Hodge and some at MHI, but officially MHI said nothing when Hodge left. Hodge too is an MHI unperson, as are several prior MHI presidents and CEOs or other VPs. Students of George Orwell, 1984, double-speak, double think, and memory holes, take note. Some of the missing former 21st century MHI presidents and CEOs or former vice presidents are linked as shown. For more on MIA from the MHI website former VP’s Tom Heinemann, Bruce Savage, Lois Starkey, or Danny Ghorbani, see click on any of those linked names.

 

 

To properly understand how the 21st century manufactured housing industry could crash and stay at historically low levels, oddly following the passage of legislation meant to benefit and grow the industry, some Orwellian terminology is arguably useful when looking at MHI’s website and communications strategy. A quick guide to some of the useful terms and their importance found in George Orwell’s fictional classic, 1984, are shown below.

 

 

5) So, the takeaways from this exercise are simple. Compared to MHI, NAR and MHARR (among others) are far more transparent. Like MHARR, NAR posts its emailed news on its website. Like MHARR, NAR responds to inquiries. Like MHARR, NAR appears to be demonstrably interested in providing information when contacted. Which ought to beg several questions about MHI. Why is it that MHI has developed this apparently Orwellian method of eliminating people and documents that don’t fit their current narrative? Doesn’t – or should that apparent pattern – undermine MHI’s credibility?

 

 

6) Left-leaning Bing’s AI powered Copilot repeatedly confirmed such points of concern about MHI as well as MHI-linked trade media and bloggers.

 

 

7) So, MHARR, NAR, and several other trade groups are routinely more responsive and more transparent than MHI. Why does this matter? Because manufactured housing is demonstrably underperforming during an affordable housing crisis.

 

8) MHProNews and our MHLivingNews sister site stand essentially alone in the balance of what passes as MHVille trade publishers and bloggers. In fairness, Kurt Kelley’s MHReview does tend to run an article a quarter or so by MHARR. Good luck in finding MHARR content on any other site that isn’t ours in manufactured housing. That said, even Kelley is overwhelmingly a provider of MHI orbit linked content.  Among the drawbacks to Kelley’s publication, as slick as it looks, is that readership is reportedly low, and it in recent years, it is only published once a quarter. A comparison with MHI and other MHVille industry linked media, fact checked by Copilot, is linked below.  Short version? MHProNews is the documented runaway largest and most read trade media serving manufactured housing.  This platform also delivers the most diverse content, as a review of the top-read articles in a given month reveals.

 

 

9) MHARR has been institutionally stable for decades. MHARR, unlike MHI, is not a revolving door of people coming in and people going out. As recently as a few years ago, MHI used to list its staff on their website. Certainly, since MHI gave their website a face lift (and apparently began scrubbing some of their own prior content), MHI on this date only readily and visibly shows two people on staff. Mark Bowersox, President. Lesli Gooch, Ph.D., CEO. They reportedly have several others working at/with MHI. Their outside designated PR person, Molly Boyle with FPMGI, has yet to reply to a single inquiry.  Per every reply to an outreach MHProNews has done to an outside news organization last year, none that mentioned some arguably problematic information from MHI said that they heard from MHI. Nor from others linked to MHI. Now, look back up at the NAR Scholastic Cororaton point (Part II #3). Potentially useful research for the manufactured housing industry produced from the giant NAR organization, nevertheless had some terminology, date, and other glitches. They never heard from MHI either prior to this writer’s outreach and a requested follow up by Mark Weiss, J.D., with MHARR. That’s not an insignificant fact or evidence pattern. Transparency and responsiveness, and engagement with outside operations was supposedly part of the purpose of MHI hiring a PR person following an MHProNews outreach, with this reminder below.

10) To Frank Rolfe’s credit, he has periodically ranted against MHI for approaching a decade.

11) The balance of that is that as useful as some of Rolfe’s complaints and finger pointing may be, some fingers may be pointing back at him and his longtime partner, Dave Reynolds.

 

 

 

12) This analysis will be drawn towards a close with this next item. MHI’s behavior is either erratic, disconnected, corrupt, unprofessional, or unstated agenda that is conflict-of-interest riddled behavior driven. That behavior, per Copilot and other sources, may involve actionable behavior and some of it may be criminal in nature. To learn more, see the latest from this writer’s series on the Patch. Some familiar ground, but also considerable new evidence is presented in that fact-packed analysis with commentary.

 

 

For the rest of the story on many affordable housing and MHVille linked stories, you are already on the #1 website on the planet for such research and reports. Given that attorneys, investors, numerous public officials, educators, nonprofits, researchers, plus thousands upon thousands of pros flocking here daily from the ranks of our diminished industry, there is no other known resource for this level of evidence-backed and detailed reporting. Who says? Besides several industry peers, AI powered Copilot.  Don’t miss the report linked here and above. Because 2025 promises to bring more of it to shine a light on why manufactured housing is underperforming during an affordable housing crisis.

 

 

 

PS: a snowstorm that hit Washington, D.C., combined with other factors have per sources delayed MHARR’s monthly data release. Watch for it later this week.