In the ongoing effort to reduce advertisement revenue, to offend REALTORS® everywhere, and to support increased difficulty in home purchasing, the Raleigh News and Observer also took a few swipes at all of us in an editorial that commingled REALTORS®, commissions, legislative corruption, and generally got me worked up a little.

Check it out for yourself.

Quite a few nasty and tangential digs in there, aren't there?  Associates at KELLER WILLIAMS® Realty Market Center #377 in Cary, NC were asked to chime in to the N&O with our dissent.

Well, you can usually count me in on the old, "Chime In With Dissent."

Here's my offering, just submitted:

"The N & O editorial, "At the Closing" was disappointing.  I am a REALTOR^® and proud of the service I offer.  (REALTOR^® is a copyrighted trademark, and is misused when spelled in lower case as you do.  Proper usage is seen in your Real Estate Classifieds.)

I often work with first-time Buyers, people who are reaching for the first rung of the ladder to wealth:  Home Ownership.  Only a heartless person could work with first-time Buyers and not become an advocate for them, considering the effort required to buy that first home.

The News and Observer's cavalier attitude regarding gratuitously raising the threshold to participation is disheartening.  What agenda applauds the use of government to help price people out of the housing market? 

A better approach would be creative property taxes providing amortization of long term bonds.  That would spread the cost of growth among those of us who have benefited from growth in the last 15 or 20 years, and spread those costs to those who are coming to the area.  It would not increase the cost of a home, or the REALTOR^® commissions you denigrate.

The eagerness of legislators to sell their votes is indeed shameful.  We shouldn't confuse that sad tendency with a punishing and poorly conceived tax designed to artificially increase home costs for those who can least afford it."

You saw it first on AR.  We need to get Leigh Brown into the State House for a little straight talk...