April is Fair Housing Month. Jared Wilk, 2024 President of GBAR (Greater Boston Association of Realtors), sent out his monthly message. Here is his outline, with my responses after the series of dashes (—–).

  • Take the fair housing course. — well, of course!
  • Learn about implicit bias. — The summary page for Realtors explained what implicit bias is, but it contained a dead link, instead of the link for Project Implicit.
  • Go to an affordable housing finance class to learn about down payment assistance and affordable mortgage programs for moderate income buyers. — There is so much that bothers me about the Realtors offering a program about first-time homeowner’s programs during Fair Housing Month.
      • They advertised it as a DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiative. This feels like so much tokenism/window dressing. Down payment assistance and affordable mortgage programs serve potential buyers up to 130% of median income. The programs serve people in protected classes, yes. These programs also serve people who are not in protected classes, but earn a moderate income and lack accumulated wealth.

Realtors (and all licensees) should not be discriminating against people who do not come to the homebuying process with large down payments or cash in hand. If the Realtors were serious about supporting these (wonderful) programs, they would discourage their members from advising seller-clients to choose wealthier buyers.

As long as the sale can close on time, it should not matter to a seller how the purchase is financed. Sellers do not know about how buyer financing works; they are getting the advice of their agents. That advice needs to change, if there is going to be housing equity.

Wilk continued:

  • Congratulations to Paul Yorkis, who won the NAR Fair Housing Award this year. His focus: Language access. He worked to get states to translate basic forms into other languages. He set up ASL (American Sign Language for Deaf people) classes for Realtors. —- This is just wonderful. I was so pleased that Paul Yorkis lives and works here in Massachusetts.

Then, President Wilk reviewed current Realtor lobbying:

  • NAR (National Association of Realtors), MAR (Massachusetts Association of Realtors) , and GBAR (Greater Boston Association of Realtors) opposes the real estate transfer tax. It imposes a tax on homeowners and buyers to benefit other people. — This is where our company’s sense of community responsibility and the Realtors’ diverges.
      • The addition of a fee to keep people housed is a responsibility of people who benefited from the American Dream. America is a wealthy country. Many Americans gained their wealth through real estate.
      • We exclusive buyers’ agents are in the trenches, seeing how housing prices are rising at an unsustainable rate. Owners have been benefiting from that–to the detriment of today’s buyers and everyone who cannot afford to buy.
      • We are seeing how buyers who cannot pay in cash or don’t have 20% are treated like second class, even though their money is just as green on closing day. This insistence of high down payments or cash is further benefiting those who have wealth over those who are trying to break into the market. It is deepening inequality.
      • We do not see the transfer fees as a significant disincentive to buying and selling. The level of housing inflation is already high. If speculators are hurt by needing to pay transfer fees, so be it.  Click here for a post that does the math about the size and impact of proposed transfer fees.

The Realtors® have a mission: “Home ownership and private property rights.”

At 4 Buyers Real Estate, our mission is clearly something else. We are in it for the people in those homes.