A RE/MAX Broker/Owner from Illinois found herself mentioned in several national newspapers after a spirited
exchange with President Barack Obama at an Aug. 17 town hall meeting in her home state.LuAnn Lavine was
quoted in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, the Chicago Sun-Times and several
other prominent news outlets (including CNN, NBC and MSNBC) after telling the president that problems in
Washington, D.C., have wiped out the housing momentum she was seeing in her local market: "I saw a
turnaround come May and June. My phone was ringing. I was busier than all get-out. I could see that the
country – yes, we are in rehab. People have made adjustments and I saw progress. Since the debt ceiling
fiasco in Washington, the phones have stopped. We have no consumer confidence after what has just
happened. Interest rates are a record low. I should be out working 14 hours a day, and I am not."
Read what she says about the experience in an Aug. 29 Inman News article.
The Broker/Owner of RE/MAX Hometown Advantage in Geneseo, Ill., challenged the president on housing
when she was picked to address him during the question-and-answer portion of the meeting. She was
especially direct when his initial answer focused on his administrations's efforts to keep people in their
homes, saying "the loan modification system has been a nightmare. Short sales are a nightmare."
Afterward, Lavine was flooded by reporters looking for follow-up interviews – not to mention texts and
voicemails from colleagues expressing their pride and appreciation.
Here is a transcript of the exchange.
LUANNE LAVINE: My name is Luanne Levine, and I own a local real estate company here in Henry County,
over in Geneseo. So you know we're I'm headed: housing. Every week I sit around the kitchen table of families
that are here today and I listen to the stories of a lost job, upside down in their house. And they ask, Luanne,
how can you help? What programs are out there?
I have to say I saw a turnaround come May and June. My phone was ringing. I was busier than all get-out.
I could see that the country -- yes, we are in rehab. People have made adjustments and I saw progress.
Since the debt ceiling fiasco in Washington, the phones have stopped. We have no consumer confidence
after what has just happened. Interest rates are a record low. I should be out working 14 hours a day, and
I am not. What are your future plans in helping middle-class America -- Generation X and Y and middle-class
America will get the country out of where we are, and I want to know what are your contingent plans?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, first of all, you're absolutely right that housing has been at the key – at the core of
a lot of the hardships we've been going through over the last two and a half years. And that's why we've
made it such a priority to try to help families stay in their homes the last two and a half years. And that's
why we've made it such a priority to try to help families stay in their homes if they can still afford the home.
There were some folks who couldn't -- who bought homes they couldn't afford, but there were a lot of folks
who just had a run of bad luck because somebody lost a job or lost a shift. And so what we've been trying
to do is push the banks, push the servicers to do loan modifications that will allow people to stay in their
homes and will try to buck up housing prices generally.
LUANNE LAVINE: Can I -- Can I please say --
THE PRESIDENT: Sure, go ahead.
LUANNE LAVINE: The loan modification system has been a nightmare. Short sales are a nightmare. And
the lenders are so tight and you have to be so perfect, and it's not a perfect world.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, what we've been trying to do is make sure that -- we've probably had a couple of
million loan modifications that have been taking place. The problem is, is that the housing market is so big.
And so a lot of families have just had to work down their debts, and they've been successful -- and as you
said, we were starting to see things bottom out and confidence start picking up.
Now, I can't excuse the self-inflicted wound that was that whole debt debate. It shouldn 't have happened the
way it did. We shouldn't have gotten that close to the brink. It was inexcusable. But moving forward, I think
a lot of this has to do with confidence, as you said.
LUANNE LAVINE: A hundred percent.
THE PRESIDENT: Companies have never been more profitable. They're seeing record profits; it's just they're
hoarding their cash, they're not investing it. A lot of banks have now recovered, but they're not lending the
way they used to. Now, they need to have slightly tighter lending criteria than they used to have, obviously,
because that was part of the reason that we had that housing bubble. But one of the things we've talked
about is, can we encourage banks now to take a look at customers who are good credit risks, but are being
unfairly punished as a consequence of what happened overall?
There are some other ideas that we're looking at on the housing front. But I'll be honest with you, when you've
got many trillions of dollars' worth of housing stock out there, the federal government is not going to be able
to do this all by itself. It's going to require consumers and banks and the private sector working alongside
government to make sure that we can actually get the housing moving back again. And it will probably take
this year and next year for us to see a slow appreciation again in the housing market.
What we can do is make sure we don't do any damage. And that's what happened in this last month. That's
why I was so frustrated by it, and I suspect that's why you were so frustrated by it as well.
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