Realtors Lobby Readies Push-Button Answer

Soon, legislation brewing on Capitol Hill or in the White House that goes against the interests of the National Assn. of Realtors could trigger an avalanche of mail from outraged real-estate agents.

Only, in this case, the realtors will not actually have sent it. A new lobbying method being introduced by the powerful NAR, a trade group representing 800,000 of the nation’s real-estate agents, will allow the organization to send out overnight Western Union Mailgrams in the names of individual NAR members to lawmakers and officials.

While the association, like other organizations, has long had the ability to trigger a flood of mail from its members to Congress and the White House, its new “Legislative Rapid Response” system goes one step further: Individual real-estate agents no longer even have to pick up a pen or the telephone.

It’s a “tool that allows (NAR members) to express their opinion in an effective, rapid way that saves them the trouble of sitting down and writing a letter,” said Stephen Driesler, the NAR’s chief lobbyist.

NAR members who sign up for the new system pay $21.75 and agree to allow NAR to send up to three Mailgrams in their name during a 15-month period without the association asking for further permission, said David Lynch, the group’s political communications network director. About 400 realtors have signed up so far for the system.

Grass-roots lobbying efforts, where thousands of trade-group members inundate legislators with mail, sometimes using form letters distributed by the trade groups, are not uncommon. At NAR’s urging, more than 25,000 association members wrote President Bush in late 1988 and early 1989, asking his support to retain the mortgage-interest deduction for federal tax returns.

But legislators and others question the effectiveness of these mass mailings.

“I would say that for most (legislators), the thing that is most effective is the kind of mail that comes from people scrawling on individual pieces of paper,” said a spokesman for Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-N.Y.). Downey was inundated with mail from NAR members and other industry trade groups in 1988 after he suggested that Congress look at limiting the mortgage-interest tax deduction.

The rapid-response system is “a little bit like a form letter,” Driesler said. “We know that form letters do not have the impact of personal letters.” However, he said, the new system’s attraction lies in its immediacy--the association can reach legislators the next day as opposed to waiting two or three weeks for members to call or write lawmakers in response to a call from NAR.

Bernadette McTighe, executive director of the Rockville, Md.-based Single Agency Realty Assn., who has long been at odds with NAR, expressed dismay at the rapid-response system, saying it asks members to “contribute to their own corruption” by taking away their ability to form their own opinions.