NVBR Delegation Attends NARdigras

This past week several NVBR members headed to New Orleans for the 2010 National Association of REALTORS® convention. The five-day event was packed with seminars, a 500-vendor exhibition and significant discussions about real estate in the US.

Highlights of the convention included a discussion between NAR President-elect Ron Phipps and FHA Secretary David Stevens who talked about the struggles home buyers are having with financing.  Secretary Stevens said that the banking industry’s approach to who can and can’t qualify for mortgage financing is artificially constraining home sales at a time when the economy is looking at the real estate sector to spur on the economy.

NAR has urged mortgage lenders, FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and federal regulators to amend their credit policies to increase lending to qualified home buyers. NAR’s Conventional Finance and Lending Committee has developed recommended credit policies around specific issues, including education and research, use of credit scores, the impact of adverse credit events, loan modifications, and strategic defaults.

NAR’s Chief Economist Lawrence Yun gave his annual report on economic trends.  According to Yun, After the recent downturn, the housing market is clawing its way back to a point of near stability with the pace of new foreclosures easing, sales moving toward historically normal levels and prices on a national basis gaining modestly.

However, despite sitting on lots of cash, big businesses aren’t spending to create enough jobs to budge the unemployment rate. That’s hurting home sales and keeping consumer confidence down, which is further hurting sales. But businesses could start spending soon, which would help solidify steady improvements seen in residential real estate markets and make 2011 better than this year.

In other news from the Convention, the NAR Board of Directors and Delegates body looked at several changes in the area of professional standards. Among them, a change was passed in the Code of Ethics to prohibit NAR members from discriminating against other members on the basis of sexual orientation.

The Board also repositioned the Real Estate Buyers Agent Council (REBAC) as a new-styled educational entity to maintain REALTORS®’ training edge in a variety of new areas.  The new entity is named The Center for Specialized REALTOR® Education.

NAR’s Real Property Resource CEO Dale Ross reported that RPR now has more than 179,000 REALTORS® accessing it in 41 markets. It has contracted with another 135 MLSs to become partners, and 387 MLS partnerships are under contract review; that means more than 250,000 REALTORS® are slated to be on the system by year’s end. RPR is an initiative, launched last year, to make available—free and exclusively to REALTORS®—rich data on every property in the United States. 

More highlights from the convention can be found on the top “hot topics” banner at  www.realtor.org.