The claim he would not make
At Inman Connect San Diego, Judd Hoffman asked Phil Hawkins, CEO of the California Association of REALTORS®, how Ethica changes an agent's transaction.
Hawkins declined the premise.
"I wouldn't say it completely changes it. What it does, it's your assistant in doing the transaction."
That's a smaller claim than the question offered him, and he's the one person on that stage with no commercial reason to make it. C.A.R. has put member dues behind Ethica, so overselling it would have been the easy move.
He didn't, and the restraint is the point.
A transaction is a legal process. Parties, deadlines, disclosures, forms that have to be right. Software doesn't get to rewrite any of it, and an agent should be suspicious of anything claiming otherwise.
What an assistant changes is narrower, and it's the part you can actually check. A transaction stops waiting on a desk, because the work can move from wherever the agent already is. And there's less to go back and correct, because details get captured once, when they're said, rather than reconstructed later from memory.
Neither of those is a transformation. Both are the kind of claim an agent can test against their own week.
That's the difference between a tool describing something it can do and a tool describing something it can't. Hawkins picked the first one, in front of a room of the members whose dues paid for it.
The full conversation is on the blog.
