Decade-long accessibility push earns Seattle agent fair housing honor

A decade after addressing a room full of real estate agents as a motivational speaker, Barry Long is being recognized as a 2026 National Association of Realtors (NAR) Fair Housing Champion.

Home accessibility search standards that Long co-developed are being adopted by multiple listing services (MLS) nationwide — transforming how homebuyers living with disabilities find properties.

Long, a T5 paraplegic who uses a manual wheelchair, was living in Alaska and working as a fishing guide when a motorcycle crash in the early 1990s changed his life.

He returned to school, then spent multiple years backpacking around the world.

“I went out and bungee jumped and skydived and scuba dived and raced wheelchairs and just took the whole wheelchair thing on as an adventure versus a disability,” Long told HousingWire.

That perspective launched a career as a motivational speaker with clients including Boeing, Microsoft, Alaska Airlines and T-Mobile. In 2015, he was hired to speak at a local Sotheby’s International Realty office.

It was at that event that Long’s challenge cut to the heart of a broken system.

“I said, ‘Hey, you know what? I’ve been in a wheelchair for 25 years at this point, and there is no way for me to find a home that has accessibility features,’” he said. “I told them, ‘There was no way for me to sell a home that has accessibility features. You’re Sotheby’s, so what are you going to do about it?'”

Executives took him seriously — and invited him to lunch roughly one month later.

“They said, ‘You know, Barry? You’re right, the system is broken across the country in real estate, there’s no way to capture accessibility, and we don’t know why, because the [Americans with Disabilities Act] passed in 1990, and you might be able to figure it out. You could come help us,'” Long said. “That was what started this whole thing. It was literally a challenge at a public speaking gig.”

In 2016, Seattle-based Marketplace Sotheby’s International Realty paid for Long to get his real estate license to help fix the system.

He still maintains his speaking company — Talk & Roll Enterprises Inc. — though it now serves as a side venture in relation to real estate work.

A partnership forms

Working as an agent, Long soon connected with Tom Minty of John L. Scott Real Estate.

Minty had been working on similar accessibility initiatives after struggling to find a home for a client living with muscular dystrophy.

He and Long discovered they lived just eight minutes apart.

“I called him up and said, ‘Hey, Tom, you don’t know who I am, but here’s what I’m about ready to take on,’ and he said he’d been wanting to do this for years,” said Long.

They established Minty’s earlier company — Able Environments — as a formal corporation and partnered with the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS), which opened its dataset to them.

Long gained new perspective on why accessibility standards had been lacking nationwide.

“There’s a definition for a bedroom, there’s a definition for a bathroom, whether it’s a half-bath or a whole bathroom, three-quarter bath and so on,” he said. “There’s definitions around square footage and about all of these things, but there’s no definition for the word accessibility, because accessibility is relative.

“My accessibility in a manual wheelchair is completely different than the accessibility of somebody in a power chair, or a walker, or developmentally disabled, or blind or deaf. The list goes on and on. So, there was no way to actually take a home and say, ‘This home is accessible,’ because there’s no yes-no answer to that, so everyone was afraid of it.”

Searchable standards

Long and Minty developed 12 accessibility feature categories — including approach, entrance, living space, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and home automation.

Agents can check whether a property has an accessible bathroom without determining who might use it.

“You’re not trying to guess whether it’s somebody who’s in a wheelchair who’s going to use it,” said Long. “If there’s a no-lip entry into the shower, that could be used by any number of people. It could be used by a person in a wheelchair, a person in a walker or just a person who doesn’t like stepping over steps.”

NWMLS adopted the standards and Long said he has since communicated with leaders from Realtor.com, Homes.com and Zillow on the matter.

 The Real Estate Standards Organization has also given the criteria its preliminary approval as a national standard, he added.

“I want somebody in Illinois to be able to search for our house in Seattle and go, ‘Hey, does it have a three-bed, two-bath in this school district, and does it have an accessible approach and accessible entrance?’ That’s the goal,” Long said.

Training and misconceptions

Long and Minty created a 10-hour Association of Real Estate License Law Officials-approved master class leading to the Accessibility Real Estate Specialist, or ARES, designation.

That included turning a barn on Long’s property into a recording studio — bringing in experts from the disability, architecture and legal fields and creating video-based course material.

Long says the biggest agent misconceptions that he wants to debunk involve accessible homes being perceived as “hospital-esque.”

“You can walk through [modern accessible homes] and you would go, ‘This is one of the most beautiful houses I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You would have no idea that it’s absolutely 100% accessible for somebody in a power wheelchair.

“We fight this old school stereotype that if a house has a ramp, then it’s going to be devalued, because all those people not looking for a handicapped house aren’t going to look at that house, and we found that’s not the case at all.”

Aging in place, industry impact

Long sees accessibility upgrades as a value-add, especially as more than 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 daily. He and Minty met with appraisers to advocate for recognizing accessibility in property valuations — also noting a local 55-and-over community where every home had two steps to enter.

“Accessibility is a value-add to properties that are now being sold,” Long said. “The hope is that builders start seeing that and add the accessibility just to the inherent design of their architecture.”

Able Environments has also created a nonprofit to help other MLSs adopt the standards without financial barriers. The VA has expressed interest in implementing the system, and Long said he recently met with its deputy director.

Standards Long helped create are now positioned to become a national benchmark — and his recognition as a Fair Housing Champion has given a decade-long effort the ultimate validation.

“One in four people in this country have some kind of a disability, it’s a known stat,” Long said. “This isn’t just a thing for them. Everybody who’s looking for a house can benefit from this information that’s out there.”