Fitzsimon File

The North Carolina Association of Realtors is it again, this time misleading the voters in counties where a proposal to raise the real estate transfer tax is on the ballot.  The Realtors spent more than $600,000 on a slick media campaign this summer to try to deny people the right to vote on how to pay for new schools and other costs associated with the growth that brings the Realtors their billions in revenue every year.

The General Assembly ignored the misleading ads and scare tactics and voted to allow counties to raise the transfer tax by .4 percent if local voters approve it in a referendum. The legislation allows counties to raise the local sales tax by ¼ of a cent instead if the voters approve it.

Next month, voters in ten counties will have the chance to vote on the small increase in the transfer tax. Eleven counties will have the sales tax increase on the ballot and five counties are asking voters for their opinion on both taxes.

The Realtors are now busy in every county with a referendum on the transfer tax, forming local committees that use much of the same rhetoric that marked their failed statewide effort this summer. They call it a home tax, a tax on the American Dream, and ironically, claim it will make homes unaffordable for many first-time buyers.  

The Realtors have now spent close to a million dollars in their campaign against the local transfer tax initiatives and that doesn’t include the million dollars they have funneled to political campaigns in the last two years. That’s a lot of money, but the Realtors have it. They made $1.72 billion in 2006 just on the sale of existing homes. Add in new home sales and the total certainly is well above $2 billion.

The Realtors have a new strategy in their effort to avoid paying for some of the costs of the growth that is making them flush. They are citing a June report on local government business incentives by the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law, an organization run by former Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr until he left to run for the Republican nomination for Governor.

The reports finds that local governments approved $403 million in incentives from 2004-2006, a staggering total that deserves more discussion in policy circles than it has received. But the Realtors don’t want a debate about local incentives, they just want to use the numbers to claim that no county needs to raise the transfer tax to pay for growth, they just need to stop giving money to businesses.

One political consultant on the Realtors payroll pounds that talking point regularly on television and radio talk shows. Local governments don’t need more revenue, he says. That $400 million would build a lot of schools. 

"But that clever talking point simply doesn’t hold up when you look behind the numbers. The incentives report finds that three of counties that are holding votes on the transfer tax next month, Gates, Macon, and Swain, gave no incentives to corporations in the last three years."

That must mean that the Realtors think its ok to vote for the tax in those counties. And most of the rest of the counties approved incentives that total far less than the small transfer tax would raise.  

The report says that Henderson County approved $335,000 in business incentives in the last three years, but the transfer tax on the ballot would raise $1.5 million a year. In three years that’s more than 13 times more than the incentives given away.

Yet the Realtors and their consultants keep citing the $400 million figure as if it explains away the needs of counties to raise new revenue to provide the services that make the area so attractive to homebuyers, so home sellers can fork over 6 percent of their home equity to the Realtors.

Let’s hope that local voters are as wise as the General Assembly and realize that it’s not the American Dream the Realtors are so feverishly trying to protect, it’s their billions in profits.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.