Political Advocacy: Louisiana Win About More Than Transfer Taxes

After challenging a statewide transfer tax proposal in the mid 2000s and several local efforts to impose a similar tax more recently, the leadership of the Louisiana REALTORS® Association last year acted preemptively and put a stop to any future efforts to tax the transfer of real estate.

“We were able to beat those earlier efforts back, but we could see similar efforts cropping up all across the country,” says Norman Morris, the association’s government affairs director. “So, we decided to be proactive and put together a constitutional amendment that would prevent these efforts from coming up again.”

The campaign worked. In November, Louisiana voters approved the amendment to ban transfer taxes in the state permanently. The association reached out for help through the My REALTOR® Party initiative, the political advocacy program that the NAR Board of Directors created in 2011 to help state and local associations fight exactly the kind of battle Louisiana was taking on.

To tap the financial and technical help that’s made available, the Louisiana association completed an application in which it was asked to detail what was needed in the state and what it wanted to do about it. The application was submitted to NAR’s Issue Mobilization Committee for its input and within a short time the association was working with NAR on its campaign.

Under the plan, the Louisiana association poured its resources into what it does best—working with its state legislature—while NAR came in later, mainly on the ballot initiative.

“In Louisiana, an initiative can’t go on the ballot until it first passes both chambers of the legislature by a two-thirds vote, so that’s where we concentrated our efforts,” Morris says. “Every single lawmaker ended up voting yes.” The legislative language was drafted with the help of law firm Robinson & Cole, whose services NAR makes available through the initiative at a discount.

With the legislative win, the amendment was put before the voters as a ballot question in the state’s Nov. 19 general election. Passage requires a simple majority—51 percent—but it ended up winning by a whopping 81 percent vote. “This is where NAR’s help really made a difference,” says Louisiana REALTORS® Association chief Malcolm Young.

Behind the big win was a consumer campaign. The state association took the lead on TV and radio spots, online outreach, and other facets of a broad-based media strategy, while NAR and its consultants focused principally on grassroots activism, working with the association on polling and voter outreach through highly targeted direct mail.

Polling showed that consumers supported what the REALTORS® were doing, but there was also the potential for misunderstanding about the issue. The campaign focused on the explaining the language of the ballot measure. “People were ready to vote no on taxes, but on the ballot question they would be asked to vote yes on the constitutional amendment against future real estate transfer taxes, so we had to make sure they understood that.”

More than a great victory, the effort put in place an infrastructure that the association can tap again and again as issues arise in the future, says Young. The association now has a permanent consumer-facing Web site, the Louisiana Homeowner Resource Center, which provides a range of issue advocacy tools.

An added benefit, Young believes, is the goodwill accrued to REALTORS® as a result of the campaign. “It’s given [consumers] confidence about what we can deliver,” he says. “Everybody we talked to really applauded the REALTORS® for becoming consumer champions.” And the impact on the association’s members was just as important. “In my 17 years in the industry, I’ve never seen our members so engaged,” says Morris. “They made calls, put up signs, gave talks—they could see how important this was to their customers and clients.”