Attorney General Martha Coakley hailed Realtors as doing the important work of helping people buy not just a house, but a home, in a speech delivered yesterday at a gathering of Massachusetts realtors on Beacon Hill.
Coakley spoke at length about her office’s efforts to prevent foreclosure and help homeowners seeking to keep their homes obtain loan modifications and other forms of aid.
Calling claims, including those from The Warren Group, that the foreclosure crisis is winding down "more aspirational than actual," she nevertheless spoke warmly of the positive impact of the state’s new loan modification law, passed last fall, which requires lenders to see if a loan mod is financially feasible before beginning the foreclosure process in reducing foreclosures.
Citing a case that her office had handled in which a homeowner was refused a principle reduction of $50,000 for an East Boston property that ultimately sold at a foreclosure auction for a loss of more than $100,000, she said that banks seemed to be taking the position, "‘We foreclose because that’s what we do,’ and it didn’t really make sense for anybody."
Coakley’s office has worked with the Massachusetts Association of Realtors to lobby for two bills currently under consideration on the Hill, one of which would make it easier for towns to seize and sell abandoned properties, and another which would help stop the theft of copper wires and pipes from homes by requiring scrap dealers to track the sales of the metal and create a registry of abandoned properties so cities and towns can act quickly to prevent thefts.
The assembled real estate agents also planned to lobby their local representatives on several other bills of interest to the group, including a proposed law to allow homeowners to have their debt forgiven when they sell a distressed property, escaping capital gains taxes that would normally be due. An existing law already provides this relief for distressed homeowners at the federal level. The Realtors are also seeking to pass a bill that would increase the professional educational requirements to obtain a real estate license and opposing several new, local real estate taxes proposed by several Cape Cod towns.
