If Realtors here in Massachusetts have their way, Mitt Romney will carry our traditionally liberal state by a landslide in the fall with more than 70 percent of the vote, according to a recent HomeGain poll of real estate agents across the commonwealth. 

It’s a rather rich reward for Massachusetts’ most prominent prodigal son. Romney turned a blind eye to the housing bubble during his time as governor and has spent the years since building his political career by tearing down the state that launched him onto the national stage.

Amazingly, our Realtors are even more staunchly pro-Romney than their counterparts across the country, red states and all – and that’s saying a lot given how conservative a bunch the men and women who sell homes for a living are.

Romney wins only 57 percent of the vote in HomeGain’s national poll, with Ron Paul taking 12 percent and Obama 31 percent. In a sign that our local Realtors haven’t lost all sense, in the Massachusetts poll, Paul got a big fat zero.

Short Memories?

Maybe our local real estate agents are sim

ply too busy selling homes once again to recall Romney’s mediocre tenure as governor, a time when home prices galloped out of control and foreclosures 

started to rise ominously. After all, no thanks to Obama, the real estate market finally appears to have hit bottom and begun to resurface, with this spring the best in years.

But let’s take a short walk down memory lane.

Romney is a smart guy and by all a

ccounts a pretty sharp businessman. But despite a few early flashes of promise, Romney spent the last two years of his one term in office running for president instead of trying to come to grips with the Bay State’s increasingly intractable real estate woes.

The more things change, the more they stay the same here in Massachusetts, with high home prices and anemic new construction, especially within the 495 beltway, slowly but surely putting the squeeze on our vibrant economy.

To his credit, Romney saw through to the core of the problem – draconian local restrictions on land development that had all but shut down new housing construction. And instead of pandering to politically powerful local officials, Romney proposed a tough series of penalties for communities that tried to zone out new homes and condos.

It was a good idea, but it got batted about and watered down on Beacon Hill, finally fading away after Romney began campaigning in earnest for the Republican presidential nomination just about two years after he got elected in November 2002.

Romney’s track record was not so hot, though, when it came to spotting the budding subprime mortgage crisis, which in the mid-2000s was already starting to trigger an alarmingly rapid increase in foreclosures in urban neighborhoods across the state.

It was a matter of picking up the paper or doing a little research. But Romney, like so many other state and national leaders at the time, was apparently too busy with the business of getting ahead to be bothered. 

Funny thing, as foreclosures mounted, Romney cut back on the number of state mortgage and bank inspectors.

Obama Mucks It Up

Still, the poll results may not be a case of misguided Romney love as much as it is a sign of growing frustration and disgust with how Obama has dealt with the troubled real estate market.

More than 70 percent of Massachusetts Realtors said they “strongly disapprove” of Obama’s performance as president, with only 10 percent saying they “strongly approve.”

Even here in supposedly liberal Massachusetts, homeowners tallied by HomeGain had also soured on Obama, with 64 percent saying they plan to vote for Romney.

There certainly is good reason to be disenchanted. Obama’s centerpiece anti-foreclosure initiative, HAMP, has proven to be a cruel joke all around, not particularly saving all that many homeowners but rather delaying the inevitable. Instead of wiping the slate clean, we are left with what seems like a semi-permanent cloud of distressed homes hanging over the market. Everyone knows they will eventually flood onto the market, the only question is when.

Then of course, there were the homebuyer tax credits that Obama and Congress foolishly championed as some sort of relatively cheap stimulus for the beleaguered housing market.

Instead, it proved near catastrophic, artificially driving up demand and prices in the first half of 2010 before sending the market over a cliff when the credit expired that spring. The result was the double dip in prices that we are just finally starting to dig out of.

Romney No Savior

But still, Romney isn’t exactly a knight in shining armor. It’s not clear he has much of a plan for getting the real estate market back to full health.

He’s talked about repealing the mortgage interest deduction on second homes – oh yes, that’s right, I seem to recall how a surge in vacation home buying triggered the worst real estate downturn since the Great Depression.

Hoping to cheer up some down-and-out Florida homeowners, Mitt noted haplessly that he is now unemployed as well. That lame attempt at humor went over like a ton of bricks.

And he’s made some other vague statements about getting government out of the real estate market, whatever that means.

But maybe that’s enough, at least for Realtors fed up with HAMP and other faux solutions to the housing crisis cooked up by Obama and gang.

Basically, get out of the way and let the market heal itself.

If that’s truly Romney’s plan, he’s not letting on. My guess is that it is.

If nothing else, it’s won him the Realtor vote here in the Bay State. For whatever that’s worth.