For generations oldsters have kept children entranced with stories of venture, nature and animals. One those stories, passed down through generations, concerns the frog and hot water. The fable goes like this:

If you catch a frog and put him in a pan of hot water, he will jump out. But if you take that some frog and place him gently in a pan of cold water over a flame, the frog will sit quietly while the water heats until he is cooked alive.

This fable is often used as a parable to illustrate how we as human beings act like the frog.

Perhaps it is an appropriate illustration of what is happening in the real estate profession.

I have editorialized before on the poor image that some Realtors have with the public. I will continue to do so.

In the resounding success of the past two decades, I think we have been in real estate a bit like the frog. We have failed to recognize that the public is heating the water around us and that soon, if we don't awaken, that water can come to boiling point.

Example: I had lunch the other day with a very fine young man who had recently opened his own firm after working with another broker for several years. He is successful but he confesses that his major problem of overcoming an image many of his clients have of suspecting the real estate broker is not completely open in his client-broker relationship. "I'm afraid we're fast approaching the used-car dealer image with many investors," he said.

Exploring this further, I come back to my office and called several Realtors, both local and elsewhere, telling them I planned to write an editorial on this subject.

The summarized opinion of those brokers was this: Harm has been done to this profession by too many so-called real estate brokers who are developers and investors FIRST and agents for their clients second.

Ethics in our profession during these years of mushrooming expansion has always been an adjective for the other guy.

There are adequate regulations governing the members of every Real Estate Board to give our profession a better public image. The problem has been that too often the Realtors who should take the lead in registering complaints have been too busy to even bother. And, unfortunately, some have also been too busy themselves doing exactly what the "unethical" Realtor is guilty of that they don't dare complain.

Before the Real Estate profession deteriorates further in the eyes of the public - before the warm water gets unbearably hot - it is time the big frogs in the real estate pan make some noise and start jumping! As the old saying goes: "if we don't clean our own house, somebody else will."

Certainly, in this ever-increasing competition for the investment dollar, in this era when real estate is losing some of its glamour as an investment, the public on whom all real estate people depend can be a very harsh critic-Reprint of editorial in SOUTHERN REALTY NEWS by Denton Harris