Mr. Reid, president and chief executive of American Home Funding Inc., Richmond, Va., was installed this week as president of the Mortgage Bankers Association of America.
In his inaugural speech, at the group's annual convention in San Diego, he announced his program for the next year, dubbed "Head for Home." Excerpts from that speech follow.
I am committing myself and the MBA to an ambitious campaign to head for home.
If we don't head for home, we risk an environment that stifles business growth.
We risk continued, excessive legislation and regulation that will serve only to prevent us from operating as efficiently as we can. It's been said that "politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." Well, there's been far too much of that kind of politics affecting our industry -- and it's got to stop.
If we don't head for home, we risk losing homeownership and affordable housing as issues in the political debates that will dominate the national consciousness in the coming months leading up to the elections. Nowhere will we find a housing plank in the political parties' campaign platforms.
If we don't head for home, we risk being cut off from the homebuyer as new technologies and the changing role of the realtor begin to fundamentally alter the mortgage lending process and the traditional role of the mortgage banker along with it.
If we don't head for home, we risk the demise of a federal mortgage insurance program that, over the course of its 60-year history, has enabled 28 million hardworking American families to buy homes of their own. And remember, today two-thirds of FHA borrowers are first-time homebuyers, almost 25% are minority Americans, and the majority of these families are low- and moderate-income -- those for whom the road to homeownership is already too long and too rugged.
If we don't head for home, we risk seeing the end of the mortgage interest tax deduction and, with it, possibly a dramatic rise in the cost of homeownership - along with a dramatic drop in property values all across this country.
If we don't head for home, we risk letting the costs of owning a home rise - and the dream of homeownership pulled beyond the reach of more and more families each year.
We risk letting the process itself become so confusing, and so difficult, that it will simply be too much for some of our customers to cope with.
And, we risk losing touch with our immigrant and minority customers, many of whom respond to different marketing techniques and exhibit very different cultural habits.
This last point is an especially serious one in light of the fact that by the year 2000, almost 30% of our population will be minority.
Not only that, but immigrants are also the fastest growing group of homeowners in this country. According to studies, they are more likely than native-born Americans to become homeowners.
Most important of all, if we don't head for home, we risk pulling homeownership -- a dream that I am sure most of us have already achieved -- permanently beyond the reach of many of those in our children's generation and in generations to come.
So this year, I promise you that we will, indeed, head for home. We're going to do it by getting to the presidential campaigns and to both parties' national conventions. We're going to make our presence felt in Congress, particularly if the mortgage interest deduction is threatened and as the FHA battle continues on. And we're going to make sure our elected representatives, and our many regulators, know how important it is that the smothering grip of excessive legislation and regulation on commercial and residential real estate finance is loosened.
We're going to get our message out to the public through the media. We're going to build on the great public education efforts begun during (outgoing president) Joe Pickett's year. We're going to work with our partners in the secondary and primary mortgage markets to make the process simpler, clearer, and more accessible to Americans of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
We're going to do everything we can to help you, our members, become key gatekeepers in the homebuying process. I intend to promote a "see your lender first" message at every opportunity with the media.
We've made some progress in recent years in increasing the visibility of our industry. But we've got to become even more aggressive if we're not going to be squeezed out of the process by other players. I intend to see to it that that's what we do.
