Real estate professionals from Massachusetts will meet at the State House this Thursday for the annual Realtor Day on Beacon Hill.

Whether the issue is taxes or septic regulations, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors is looking for uniformity.

Realtor Day on Beacon Hill is scheduled for Thursday, and MAR members have an agenda full of priorities, such as attempting to standardize the state’s septic regulations and revisiting an issue from last year – transfer taxes. MAR continues to oppose such taxes because they specifically target home sellers, not the entire community.

Like last year, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are seeking state approval to charge property sellers a 1 percent fee to fund affordable housing. In addition, Chatham voters have sent a home rule petition to the Legislature to impose a 1 percent tax on property buyers to help pay for the expansion of the town’s sewer system.

Hoping for a repeat of last year’s performance, Realtors will be lobbying legislators to thwart those efforts.

“Affordable housing is a community-wide responsibility,” noted Stephen Ryan, MAR’s director of government affairs and general counsel. But the transfer tax singles out people selling their homes, he said.

MAR also is concerned that the approval of one transfer tax could set a precedent for other towns to use in adopting similar taxes in the future.

But Richard J. Leonard, president of The Martha’s Vineyard Co-operative Bank and chairman of the Island Housing Trust, said he feels the island situation is unique.

“We have an island that has an extremely dramatic economic situation here,” Leonard said.

The disparity between the median income for a family of four, $71,300, and the median sales price for a home, $644,000, has reached the point where other affordable housing measures are not enough, Leonard said. Money raised from the transfer tax would go toward a variety of methods – such as rental subsidies, planning tools and homebuyer assistance – to help make housing more affordable, he said.

The islands have different exemption levels for their proposed taxes. On Nantucket, the property seller would be able to exempt the first $2 million of the home sale price from the tax, while on Martha’s Vineyard sellers would be able to exempt the first $750,000. A seller who sold a $1 million home on Martha’s Vineyard, for example, would pay a 1 percent fee on $250,000 – a sum of $2,500.

“[The tax] hits everyone except those of very modest means,” Leonard said. “Those who have more modest homes would be exempt.”

‘Retaining Community’
Ryan countered that there are better options for creating affordable housing.

“There are a multitude of tools that the Legislature has provided over the years,” he said.

Some of those include Chapter 40B, the state law that enables developers to apply for a comprehensive permit, bypassing certain local approvals, if they are building housing that includes at least 20 percent units that are affordable to low- and moderate-income households; Chapter 40R, a state program that offers cash payments to towns that promote mixed-income housing development near town centers and public transportation; and Chapter 40S, a companion piece to 40R, which helps communities pay for extra educational costs stemming from new development in smart-growth districts.

Ryan also cited the Community Preservation Act, which places a tax surcharge on property owners to pay for affordable housing projects, open space acquisition and historical preservation.

“The CPA is a clear success story in Massachusetts,” Ryan said. “This is the right way to do [affordable housing].”

But while CPA is geared for low-income households, Leonard said, the need on Martha’s Vineyard is for families making more – around 150 percent of the median income.

“We’ve thought about all the options here,” he said.

There have been some 40B projects on the island, he added, with 25 percent of the homes going to families making 80 percent or less of the median income and the rest going to families making up to 150 percent of the median income.

“We’re working on all those things,” Leonard said. “We need a multi-pronged approach to do it.”

In the meantime, the high cost of housing is draining the island in terms of population, he added, as service workers, teachers, police officers, volunteer firefighters and others can no longer afford to live there.

“It’s a matter of retaining community,” Leonard said.

“This [transfer tax] is a well-thought-out piece of legislation that provides a dependable source of funds to help us complete the picture,” he said. “We simply want the right to determine this for ourselves.”

MAR, however, questions how dependable the transfer tax would be as a funding source.

“Because the real estate market is highly sensitive to economic downturns, transfer taxes would provide an unstable source of revenue,” states the MAR agenda.

Another goal on MAR’s agenda for Thursday is to push for some uniformity applied to Title 5 of the state’s environmental code, which governs the siting, construction and maintenance of all on-site wastewater disposal – or septic – systems.

The problem is “it’s being used locally as an anti-growth tool,” Ryan said. For example, some municipalities are using the code as a reason to double the required size of the leaching field, which in turn limits development, he said.

“MAR supports legislation that would ensure septic regulations are not used by communities for zoning or setting minimum lot size,” states the MAR agenda.

The Realtors want the Legislature to ensure that locally added regulations to Title 5 are scientifically warranted, and not designed simply to limit growth, Ryan said.

In fact, MAR plans to make continued development a priority on Beacon Hill.

“We’re very much focused on increasing housing production in Massachusetts,” Ryan said. In particular, the concern is finding housing for the young professionals in the state, he said.

“They don’t see the types of housing opportunities that their parents had,” Ryan said. “We’re very interested in drafting legislation that encourages the development of single-family starter homes.”

That plan would include houses between 1,500 square feet and 1,700 square feet, with small yards, built in a cluster development, he said.

The Realtors also want to revisit the rent escrow issue, something MAR and property owners have been advocating to legislators for years.

The proposed legislation would create escrow accounts for tenants having disputes with their landlords. Specifically, if a tenant withholds rent from the landlord, that rent would be set aside in the escrow account.

If a court ruling or other settlement finds in favor of the landlord, the money owed from the tenant can then be pulled from the escrow account, Ryan said.

Currently, the statute allows tenants to withhold rent for various reasons – such as breach of any material provision of the rental agreement, or violation of the state sanitary code, the state building code or any other health-and-safety regulation – but it does not require that the withheld rent be set aside in escrow.