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As you may know, I am not only the President-Elect for my local Association of Realtors, but I am also a Director for the California Association of Realtors ("CAR"). This Adventure in Real Estate is going to be about my experiences at the Spring Board of Directors Meeting and Legislative Day, which was held last week (April 28-May 2) in Sacramento, California.
This was an action-packed week full of various committee meetings, special events, and meetings with our State Assembly Members and our State Senators.
Table of Contents
I started the week off with a meeting for Local Association Leadership. The meeting discussed several topics on how association leadership, both elected Realtors and staff, can work together to bring value to the members of the association.
This was done via some panel discussions, one of which being on the topic of how "Local Leadership Shapes State Policy." This discussion highlighted several instances where local leaders in positions without a direct nexus to the real estate industry rose to positions of power in the local and regional political space, sometimes after serving just one term in a low-level position. The advice given was to make friends and work with them now, because you never know where their career will take them and when you may need their assistance with a housing issue.
This is one of the committees I am a voting member of. In this committee we discuss various bills that have been written and decide if we should recommend to the Association Board as a whole to support, oppose, or watch the bill. The particular bills and items we focus on are items that would either establish new regulatory burdens on the public as well as the agents and ones that could impact the transaction process.
Some of the bills we discussed were:
There was a very robust discussion on all of these items and ultimately positions were established and sent up the chain. All committee motions are sent for review by the Legislative Committee who then sends it to the Executive Committee for review. Each of these levels can propose modifications or send it back to the committee for additional consideration. Once it goes through this process, it goes to the entirety of the Board of Directors (roughly 700 people) for discussion and a vote.
The MLS Committee did not have a lot of items that required discussion and a vote at this meeting, so we had some very interesting educational vignettes. The first was a series of videos where high-producing agents from around the United States, who now practice in other countries, talked about what it is like operating in countries where the MLS and the concept of the Exclusive Listing Agreement do not exist. It was quite eye-opening. There is no system for buyers and sellers in these countries (Spain, Portugal, and Mexico) to know what homes sold for so they cannot properly decide what to list the home at or what to offer on a home. Buyers have to look at the company pages for several real estate companies to try and see what is even available, and since multiple agents can have the listing, there is often a great disparity in information about the house or even its price! The same thing exists for agents trying to figure out what prices to suggest to their clients.
These videos really highlighted the value of the MLS and our way of doing business. With private listing networks being created, which can fragment the available listing data, it is easy to see why CAR put these videos together. The committee will make these available soon and when they do, I will update this article with the links, assuming they are publicly available.
These videos were followed by a very lively and informative panel discussion on the new updates to the National Association of Realtors ("NAR") Clear Cooperation Policy ("CCP"), known as the "Delayed Marketing Status" or as someone quite brilliantly dubbed it during the meeting "The MLS Exclusive Status." We got to hear how these MLS providers and Zillow are implementing the policy. The most interesting aspect was that CRMLS (The "California Regional Multiple Listing Service") already has the ability to exclude listings from the internet from it's MLS provider (which we do as well) and they received a waiver from NAR to allow them to not implement the policy and to use their existing controls instead. CRMLS, for those that don't know, has roughly 50% of all of the listings in California.
Now this was a fun and rewarding day! Last year the Realtor community helped to lead an effort to pass Prop 33 and Prop 34. Prop 33 passed in every single county in the state. This was HUGE and several articles in national political journals listed CAR as a powerhouse because of this. This made our jobs MUCH easier. Two of the bills we had as "Hot Issues" were pulled by their authors. One the day we arrived and one during the day we were asking our legislators to oppose it. That REALLY showed me the power of "Organized Real Estate" and our state-level lobbying efforts.
This year happened to be the 30th Anniversary of the Costa-Hawkins legislation that has helped create rental housing supply and has helped landlords get started in the business of providing homes to those who otherwise wouldn't be able to have a roof over their heads.
The CEO of CAR is Phil Hawkins, the son of Representative Phil Hawkins who helped co-author the bill. While he was in Washington DC this year, he met with Representative Jim Costa and was able to get him to speak to us about the creation of the bill and what it took to get it into law. This was a very impactful discussion and it was great to see one of the people who helped create this very impactful law.
After this meeting was over, all 2,500 attendees dispersed and met with their various legislators. I had the pleasure of meeting Senator Henry Stern and talking with him about our housing priorities and what we could help him with. We were joined by several members of other local Realtor associations, as Senator Stern's territory covers several of our areas.
After this meeting we headed to a group lunch with the rest of the 20 or so delegates we fielded out of the Conejo Simi Moorpark Association of Realtors and we got to take a nice walk by our State Capitol building.
After lunch we met with Assembly Member Jacqui Irwin. She was busy preparring for a committee session that was right after our meeting, so she was unable to attend but sent her Chief of Staff to talk with us and to hear our concerns.
I got to speak with him regarding SB 448, which seeks to provide landlords with an easier process to remove squatters from their property, while protecting the rights of legitimate tenants. This is a bill I've been following since the CEO of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles mentioned it to me at a meeting last year. I do fully support the bill as I think it will be a win-win for landlords and for tenants. Afterall, if squatters are occupying a property, it cannot be rented to sold to a family to live in it.
These meetings took place over three days, including the open Members and Directors forum. There were many reports about the health of the association, about the sale of their Los Angeles Headquarters building, and a lot of "pomp and circumstance" around the selection of Directors for Life and the nominees for state association leadership positions.
There were quite a lot of action items to vote on from the various committees, 21 items in total. Some of the key items that were discussed were around the balcony inspection law, around affordable housing and tax initiatives, and making the condo and townhome blacklist accessible. The list is actually already publicly available, I've had it on my website here and here since 2017, it is just that most Realtors and lenders neither know of its existence nor think to look for it.
