ASHI to Washington: “Home Inspection is a Tool to Help the Home Sales Crisis”
At this writing, ASHI is scheduled to confer with lead staff for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to propose new options for the use of home inspections to help the feds address the home sales crisis.
Previously, ASHI has successfully lobbied that the government should promote voluntary home inspection to help homebuyers make good, knowledgeable housing purchases. ASHI has had good success with this argument. HUD has beefed up its positive communications to homebuyers by incorporating suggestions offered by ASHI, as evidenced in HUD’s “For Your Protection – Get a Home Inspection” message to homebuyers.
Further, HUD offers guidance in hiring a home inspector on its Web site, based on a proposal offered by ASHI. Homebuyers searching the HUD Web site for material on home inspection can access the “Ten Important Questions to Ask Your Home Inspector” link on the site.
And HUD offers a link to the ASHI Web site to help prospective homebuyers learn more about ASHI and ASHI members.
Now, ASHI would like to suggest options that would help HUD execute the housing rescue plans — options that could improve the efficiency and transparency in home sales and set a positive example for the rest of the market at a time when confidence among prospective homebuyers is sorely needed.
Foreclosed homes that will come under varying degrees of government/public sector control pursuant to the rescue programs present a unique set of challenges and responsibilities for federal regulators. Taxpayers, whose money is at risk, have an interest in the physical condition of such homes, as do prospective buyers of foreclosed homes whose expectations for sound, successful purchases from the government programs will determine the ultimate success or failure of the rescue plans.
ASHI would like HUD staff to consider means by which home inspection could be used as a tool to help the feds administer properties under their control and to restore transparency, efficiency and accountability to a realty sales system that seems to have escaped positive control.
ASHI looks forward to a free exchange of ideas with HUD to consider how the agency might enhance the use of home inspections to fit the special needs of the rescue plans. We will have more to report regarding the outcome of such discussions in future editions of the ASHI Reporter.
ASHI continues to be grateful to HUD for the access the association is afforded to make its case and discuss the unique interests of home inspectors — fruit of the positive government affairs relationship that ASHI has forged in recent years with the powerful agency.
Reinvigorating home sales may be job #1 on Capitol Hill, federal agencies
At press time, realty-related associations that are influential inside the Washington Beltway are lobbying the feds furiously to make healing the home sales market Job #1 in the economic crisis.
This is important because public policy appears to be the only mechanism with the breadth and power to lead the home sales market out of the doldrums.
ASHI is part of that effort, drawing special attention to the role that home inspection could play as the country works its way out of a serious home sales recession.
Leading policymakers are rethinking the mortgage crisis as the focal point in attacking all the economic crises — a positive, though belated, development.
One can easily argue that all the current economic crises began with a downturn in realty and the financing related to it.
Recall the subprime mortgage mess, the decline in housing values, the foreclosure crisis, the failure of lending institutions that were over-exposed to home mortgage credit, the surreal explosion of mortgage debt risk attributable to credit default swaps.
In large part, all of the various economic crises are spokes of a wheel, with the moribund homes sales industry at the hub.
A reinvigorated home sales market would be the best, broadest tonic to treat the overall economy.
Members of Congress intended to concentrate their early efforts on home sales. Yet, Treasury decided in late October and November to take funds originally intended to stabilize the housing market and instead allocate those funds to rescue banks on the verge of failure.
Granted, it is difficult to argue that the economy would be better off by allowing a large number of key banks and insurers to fail, even though they deserved to do so for making poor decisions. Perhaps Treasury did the right thing in shoring up the financial system when it did. Historians tell us it was not the stock market crash of ’29, but rather the subsequent failure of banks and utter collapse of available credit that doomed the country to the Great Depression.
But when Treasury diverted funds from the mortgage rescues to finance the bank bailouts, it may have been an untimely trade off. Great nations need to handle more than one crisis at a time, and the crisis in homes sales was too important to occupy the second spot on any priority list.
Treasury now seems to be returning focus to providing cheaper credit for homebuyers, including a new effort to make housing purchases much more affordable by dropping mortgage interest rates dramatically. And rates dropped significantly after the Federal Reserve committed $600 million to purchase mortgage debt.
James Lockhart, director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, has predicted that long-term mortgage rates could dip well below 4 percent. This could dramatically improve the marketability of homes for sale, and without requiring a larger freefall of property values, which would be devastating to the tax base of communities.
ASHI aligns with other key realty advocates in urging Congress and federal agencies to keep a laser focus on making home sales more affordable, especially with regard to lowering the cost of mortgage borrowing.
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