Pushing for Permanent Limits

This issue of California Real Estate magazine addresses several topics that will help you rethink your business and maximize sales in what is, for many of our members, a difficult and challenging market.

For starters, you’ll find a roundtable discussion with four agents who have mastered social media technologies and venues. These agents freely share their experiences as early adopters of these new technologies and reveal how, in the case of one participant, she is garnering more than 3,500 hits a day on her blog. Each participant made the leap into new media and became less dependent on print media in the process. As part of C.A.R.’s ongoing effort to embrace new media, please visit www.car.org to view video podcasts of this roundtable discussion, as well as an extended text version.

Additionally, in this issue you’ll find REALTOR®-driven models for working foreclosures, short sales, and auctions. Finally, a small article written and designed for you to tear out and distribute to your clients—“Super-size That Loan”—explains the new conforming loan limits for mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration. Conforming loan limits in our state and other high-cost states typically have been an impediment to would-be home buyers. These limits were temporarily raised when President Bush signed the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 into law in February, thereby raising these limits from $417,000 to $729,750.

It’s critical that these limits, which are set to expire Dec. 31, 2008, remain in effect into 2009 and beyond. That’s why your Leadership Team, which recently went to Washington, D.C., lobbied members of the California Congressional delegation on this issue. We lobbied to have these temporary changes made permanent to facilitate the sale of homes in California. Fortunately, every member of the California delegation that we met with understood the importance of these new limits and expressed support for making the new conforming loan limits permanent. Throughout 2008, C.A.R. will continue to work with the Senate and the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® to ensure that these new conforming loan limits remain permanent.

During these times, when many of the traditional lending sources either are out of the market or have tightened their underwriting standards, I encourage all of you, when your deal size is applicable and falls within the new $729,750 FHA loan limit, to strongly consider using FHA financing in your transactions.

William E. Brown