History
CAREA was formed in 1988. Its Articles of Association and bylaws were formally adopted on April 13, 1988. Its founding president, Arthur Tom, felt there was a need for an association for Chinese who were involved in the real estate profession in the Santa Clara Valley. He was able to secure the support of nine other Chinese-American real estate professionals to help found this association. Some of the other original 10 founding board associate are still active in this organization today such as Larry Chew and David Chui. Others have moved out of the area or have become involved with a new profession.
CAREA was formed primarily for the purpose of promoting the social and economic well-being of its associate and to further the professional image of Chinese-Americans who are engaged in the field of real estate. To achieve this goal, we needed to instigate better and closer relationships between Chinese sales agents, developers, escrow agents, real estate loan agents, appraisers, and property managers. There is a definite synergistic value for these different groups of real estate professionals to know each other and to work together. It not only goes to the bottom line, but you also might enjoy this closer relationship. Therefore, the Associateship was opened not only to real estate agents, but also to these allied real estate professionals.
When you are competing in a business world that is mostly made up of Caucasians and a field that is fairly new to Chinese-Americans, it does not hurt to interact and mingle with someone just like you who may also just be starting out, who may also want to see some role models, and who may need to know that the Chinese can succeed here as they do in the engineering or medical fields. Real estate is a much more extroverted profession than some of the other professions, and it is good that Chinese can show that they can compete successfully here as well.
One example of Chinese infiltrating a specific field is in commercial real estate. There are now many more Chinese agents involved in commercial real estate than there were 15 to 20 years ago. However, many Chinese were real estate investors way before 20 years ago. These investors had generally dealt with Caucasians as there were few Chinese commercial real estate agents to be found. Now this situation has changed dramatically in the Bay Area.
Through the years, we have met on a bimonthly basis for a very enjoyable dinner meeting at various Chinese restaurants in Santa Clara County. There is nothing like good Chinese food to motivate our associate and associates to attend a very informative and rewarding meeting. Our meetings are set up so that our associate have an excellent opportunity to meet and network with each other. We have superb presenters speaking on very relevant and current topic on real estate. We have had talks on motivation, dressing for success, how to be successful in real estate, current real estate law issues, tax issues of real estate, construction techniques, termite problems, toxic materials problems, and a host of other interesting and timely topics affecting our jobs and future.
We have found that these talks to be very helpful to our work, the information can be used immediately. We are constantly exposed to the most current tax and legal issues affecting real estate, and this has definitely been useful to us in many respects. CAREA provides the platform for a continuous cross pollination of essential information and ideas among our allied real estate associateship. It is a highly visible and viable organization that offers you an opportunity to enhance your knowledge and image in your career. It also provides the added amenity that you can socialize with contemporary Chinese-American real estate professionals. All this should lead to enhancing the bottom line of your paycheck.
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