Anthony Lamacchia: People with higher credit, paying more for their mortgage, and people with lower credit paying less. This was the mortgage guideline from the FHFA that had been talked about since January, went into place on May 1st. There was a ton of media around it, a lot of negative publicity, a lot of people interestingly even on both sides of the aisle, I should say, were speaking out against it and voila, last week during the NAR legislative meetings, FHFA reverses course and says, forget this ruling.
Was it a coincidence that it was last week during advocacy week for NAR? I don’t know, probably not, but I will tell all my realtor friends this, never ever complain about paying your realtor dues. Unless you get involved and you start going to realtor events and going to Washington, DC and getting involved locally at a state level, federal level, you will not understand how much our realtor associations do for all of us.
I was you at one time. One of the biggest mistakes I made in my career, and I mentioned it on the Our World podcast interview that I did with Chris in South Florida two weeks ago, one of the biggest mistakes that I ever made in the business was waiting till my sixth year to get involved in the realtor organization. If you’re one of these people like I used to be that every year says, “What are these realtor dues, what are they doing for me?”
Then I strongly recommend you start going to some realtor events, and you start getting involved, and you hear about the amount of advocacy that our realtor organization does for all of us. It is incredible, and I will tell you this, the truth is, we’re paying a very low price per realtor for what we are getting in return. We have the second-largest lobbying team in Washington, DC behind the NRA, National Rifle Association. Some argue that we have the strongest lobbying group.
It’s a tremendous group of people that know everybody in DC, and that’s where our country is run from. I just wanted to give them a shout out and thank you for all their hard work they did fighting to prevent this crazy FHFA guideline through Fannie and Freddie, from going into place. Then it went into place and then it appears that the administration caved, and it probably came from above the FHFA telling them, “Hey get rid of this because of the negative publicity.” Either way, I’m glad it happened. It’s a great thing and that’s all, folks. Everybody, have a great day.