URSINO: Hope is the job

The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author.

Something has been bothering me, and I am part of it.

The world has been heavy for a while now. Wars, tariffs, elections, an economy that will not settle. I am not someone who tunes out the news because it is negative. I want to stay informed, and pretending reality away has never protected anyone. But somewhere along the line, staying informed curdled into something else. A permanent low-grade anger that we carry into every interaction we have.

An industry running on empty

You can see it most clearly on social media. I spend a lot of time there, on purpose, and lately it feels like the whole platform runs on one fuel: proving somebody else wrong. Nobody lifts anyone up. And before I point a finger at anyone, let me be honest. I have been guilty of this myself. It took me far too long to notice.

In our industry, it has come through loud and clear. Two weeks ago in these pages I argued that a referral to discipline is an allegation, not a finding, and that publishing names at that stage hands the punishment to a comment section. Last week the Toronto Star asked whether the regulator has gone too far. I am not here to relitigate any of that. I am here because of what the pile-ons reveal. An industry that can generate hundreds of comments of condemnation in an afternoon, on one paragraph of information, is not an industry with an anger problem. It is an industry running on empty.

And the timing could not be worse. Because whether we are ready or not, this business is standing at the front edge of the biggest evolution it has ever seen.

AI is not coming for real estate. It is already here, restructuring what an agent actually does, task by task. I build these tools and train agents on them every day, and I can tell you the gap between the agents who engage and the agents who wait is widening every month. At the same time, the forecasts I trust do not see sales volumes recovering meaningfully for a few years. Fewer transactions, more technology, an anxious membership. That is the terrain. Nobody gets to vote on it.

Here is what I know about crossing terrain like that. You cannot do it with people who have given up on each other. A profession that spends the hardest transition in its history tearing itself apart will arrive on the other side smaller, meaner and less trusted than when it started. If it arrives at all.

Redefining hope

Which brings me to the word I have been circling. Hope.

I know how that sounds. Soft. Naive. So let me define it properly, because the best definitions were written by people facing far worse than a slow market. Barack Obama built a career on the argument that hope is not blind optimism, not the wilful ignorance that assumes problems disappear if we stop talking about them. Hope, as he defined it, is a resilient inner drive. The belief that people can shape a better future through work, courage and collective effort, held precisely when the evidence is thin.

Harvey Milk went further. His famous stump speech ended with the line “you have to give them hope,” and his point was that hope is not a mood that descends on a community. It is something the visible people owe to the people watching. In our world, that means brokers, managers, trainers, board volunteers, anyone with a platform or a title. If you have an audience in this industry, hope is part of your job description. So is the damage when you feed the pile-on instead.

And Martin Luther King Jr. told us what it costs. “With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” He did not say find a stone of hope. He said hew, or in other words, carve out of the mountain. Hope is not what you feel when things improve. Hope is the labour you put in before they do.

What does it mean to hew?

So what does hewing look like on a Tuesday? It looks like answering a new agent’s question instead of screenshotting it. Teaching what you know instead of hoarding it. Disagreeing with a policy, a board or a regulator on the substance, in daylight, without burning the person. Building something instead of dunking on someone. Waiting for a finding before you pronounce a verdict.

The evolution is coming either way. The only question we control is what kind of industry walks through it. An industry is not its regulator, its boards or its market. It is the sum of how its people treat each other when things are hard. Right now that sum is negative, and I have contributed to it.

That stops with each of us, one interaction at a time.

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