Enjoying Brokerage Insider? Please Subscribe Using Your Favorite Podcast Player.
In this episode, Eric Stegemann sits down with EVP of Operations for Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, Jessica Edgerton. They discuss the importance of making sure your brokerage website is ADA compliant.
Get an ADA audit of your brokerage website.
TRANSCRIPTION
Jessica Edgerton (00:04):
Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. This is Jessica Edgerton, executive vice president of operations and corporate counsel for LeadingRE. I am excited to have Eric Stegemann here. He is the CEO of TRIBUS and has a, was a realtor before reaching the age of 20. So he has been in the business a long time and knows it well while loving his days in real estate, he knew there was a larger opportunity to build a technology oriented brokerage. In 2004, he created river city real estate, which quickly became the largest independent brokerage in the St Louis area. There he oversaw the development of numerous real estate technology breakthroughs that were well ahead of their time. Eric is regarded as one of the brightest minds in the real estate technology realm has spoken at a number of real estate technology events. You may very well have seen him at one of ours in the past and has also spoken at Inman connect to New York, San Francisco and NAR annual conference.
Jessica Edgerton (01:03):
We see him everywhere and are very glad to have TRIBUS as part of our solutions group as well. So Eric welcome. Thank you so much today. We are talking about website accessibility. ADA real estate brokerage website accessibility issues have been around for a long time for our industry. In my NAR days, we heard about them quite regularly. Historically website accessibility has come under the umbrella of the Americans with disabilities act, which is protects people with disabilities, from dealing with public facing businesses that are inaccessible to them. So under the ADA, if you have a public facing business, you are required to take reasonable measures to make it accessible to people with disabilities. Now, once the internet came online, that was originally seen as a bricks and mortar have a ramp, make sure that people with, with in wheelchairs are able to navigate your, your aisles, things like that.
Jessica Edgerton (02:05):
Then along comes the internet and there was for a number of years some, a lack of clarity as to whether the ADA applied to public facing websites, our websites, a place of, of public access does is public. Do public accessibility laws apply to websites? The answer really now is pretty much yes, across the board. There's a little bit of haziness in some circuits, but the recommendation a hundred percent, I've never talked to an attorney that would say no, no, don't worry...
