Do you remember the first time someone sat down and talked to you about trust and what it meant? For some it might have been a parent, a grandparent, a mentor or perhaps it was part of a religious experience.

I remember that for me it was a guy named Tony Wilhelm who, during the mid 1950s, just happened to be the scoutmaster of Troop 36 sponsored by the Central Methodist Church in Traverse City, Michigan. Tony started by teaching us that a scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.

For Tony that first item, trust, was more important than the 11 other important lessons that followed. He tried to teach us that a Scout is trustworthy. A Scout tells the truth. He is honest, and he keeps his promises. People can depend on him. The first of the twelve points of the Scout Law sets a high bar for scouts. Being helpful, friendly, or courteous are simple, easily described behaviors compared to being trustworthy. Being “Worthy of Trust” means a promise made is a promise fulfilled. It means a scout will do what he says he will do. It means the scout will see things through to the moral end not the legal end.

So why are we talking about Tony and a lesson that was taught over 50 years ago? Because the American free enterprise system, the real estate industry and the American consumer are each having a crisis of trust right now. We will need more than a few Tonys to help us out of this crisis. We need to create a major initiative between our REALTOR® associations and brokerage firms to strengthen the trust that the American real estate consumer feels for the entire industry, and now is the time to get started.

Trust in American business has become a major crisis over the past few months. The problem has been identified by several very important sources. By way of example, the current Edelman Trust Barometer that surveyed 4,500 upper income, highly educated people in 20 countries, found nearly two-thirds (62 per cent) say they trust corporations less today than they did a year ago. In the US, home of some of the greatest corporate collapses and the real estate crisis that sweep up millions of families, the survey recorded the most dramatic plunge: only 38 per cent say they trust business to do what is right (a 20 per cent drop from last year) and just 17 per cent say they trust the information they get from a company.

Similar results were found through the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial trust index.

The American people are still sifting through the evidence trying to find out why, for millions of them, the American dream turned into a nightmare. Anyone familiar with the facts understands that there is lot of blame to go around. Everyone involved in the transaction should feel a little less trustworthy. Rather than waiting for some legal judgment or moral edict, each party should be asking themselves how they can begin to build a higher level of trustworthiness in the real estate experience for everyone involved.

One place to start is by understanding the burdens and costs of carrying a lack of trust forward in any business. Doing business in a “low trust environment” impacts every element of that business from its value proposition to its service package, from its marketing costs to its personnel turnover and from its risk management efforts to its regulatory environment. For every business a loss of trust equates to a loss of confidence on the part of customers, clients and personnel.

Even as our industry looks forward to the end of the recession and the beginning of what we hope will be an exciting new real estate marketplace, we must recognize that in so many ways it will be a whole new world. The focus of our industry must shift from “who sells what to whom” or “how much of it they sell” to a much broader view of both the transaction and the real estate experience. We must take a more universal view of the transaction and understand how it impacts individuals, families, neighborhoods, communities, our society and yes, even our country.

We must move away from the question of whether we are doing something right from a legal or regulatory perspective and begin to ask ourselves whether or not we are doing things the right way from a moral and ethical perspective.

No doubt the human cry will arise from the ranks that such an approach is childlike and naïve. There are shareholder interests to be recovered, bad years to be made up for and retirements to be refunded. For many there will be no ethical issues to consider, just a down cycle to be recovered from.

What a joy it would be to end this article with the idea that the choice is ours and that we should take the high ground because it is the thing to do. Unfortunately that is simply not how things will work from this point forward. That is not how the new world is going to work.

A better way to end this piece is to call the readers’ attention to the saga of Canadian musician Dave Carroll’s recent trust crisis with United Airlines.

It seems sometime in 2008, on a United flight between Chicago and Omaha, Dave and his fellow band members observed United’s ground crew mishandling an expensive guitar he had checked as baggage. Upon arrival he confirmed that the guitar had suffered extensive damage and spent the next year trying to get United to “do the right thing.” Of course they refused, and on Monday, July 7, 2009 Dave posted a video highlighting the event on YouTube.com. In the first 6 days almost 2.5 million people took four minutes to watch the video.

Within the first few days United tried desperately to reverse the damage but will now probably spend the next year awash in having been caught being non-trustworthy.

Our industry is going to find itself having the exact same non-trust issues. As a team, and as a family, we are facing a whole new era. Lets get together this time. Lets take the high ground. Lets do the right thing. Lets forget what our attorneys and regulators tell us and try out our conscience this time. Now is the time for our brokerages and our REALTOR® associations to work together to create an authentic, effective and corroborated campaign to build trust between ourselves and trust in the REALTOR® trademark.