Take the damn wheel and drive

Just as I begin to think that the media and the financial markets are actually understanding the realities of our business, a completely off-base, half-assed op-ed piece shows up in a major newspaper.

The latest was one of a flurry of articles bemoaning any effort to right the residential real estate industry via government action on behalf of beleaguered homeowners as the re-emergence of "sub-prime" lending, disguised as expanded loan programs at FHFA and FHA.

The author, a professor at the Harvard School of Business (and quietly touting his book) cobbles together fact, fiction, half-truths and urban legend into a masterful little ditty that gets both the blame and the solution to our housing crisis dead wrong, in my humble opinion.

Unfortunately, I am not a Harvard fellow, do not have a book to promote, or have leisurely hours studying inane statistics on the housing bubble to guide my vision of how we get out of this mess.

Nope, I am forced to rely on the painful, nitty-gritty, grimy details of the tragic, real-life effect all of this is having on the slice of American households here in the heartland of America, where we see people struggling with depressed home prices and collapsing consumer confidence in our financial institutions.

Here is what I know:

• The blame does not belong on the average American who bought a house with less than 20% equity.
• There is nothing, NOTHING, wrong with a government policy encouraging homeownership and a GSE dedicated to making lending affordable for as many Americans as possible.
• It was not too much regulation that brought us here, it was too little (read none).
• There needs to be a sea change in how we look at what role the government has in overseeing our financial institutions.

We have re-capitalized the banks, the insurers and soon the auto-makers. No one is allowing you, or I, or our clients this same opportunity. Who re-capitalizes the average American household?

In the public eye, in every conversation, at every opportunity, we need to tell the facts about what this is all about from our perspective. We need to challenge opinion clothed as fact, and make sure policymakers have concrete information to base their decisions on.

It is time to get serious about who should decide the direction we need to go to get the Real Estate industry back on it's feet. 

This is our car and we should be driving, we are the ones who know where to go.