Westchester County Business Journal Realtors rail against ‘mansion tax’
Realtors rail against ‘mansion tax’
A delegation of Westchester County real estate brokers will troop to Albany this week to lobby for a change in the state’s so-called “mansion tax” and other legislation that could help boost a slumping housing market.
Westchester County Board of Realtors CEO P. Gilbert Mercurio called the 1 percent tax on sales of homes priced at $1 million and up “a particularly egregious example of a state-imposed expense that makes housing much more expensive than it has to be.”
Real estate professionals from across the state also will lobby Tuesday for the elimination of another state-imposed expense for homebuyers – the mortgage recording tax on refinancings. And they will urge lawmakers to adopt a bill that would allow annual deposits of up to $10,000 for couples and $5,000 for individuals into designated first-time homebuyer accounts to be deducted from state income taxes.
“Not immediately, but it will kind of help out with this housing crisis,” Devin I. Willacy, senior associate broker at Fortunato Realty Group in Yonkers and chairman of the Westchester Realtors board’s Legislative, Political and Legal Issues Council, said of the deductible savings plan. “This will give the first-time homebuyers incentive to save up some money for a down payment,” thus replacing with homeowner’s equity the no-money-down “exotic” mortgages that have triggered the housing crisis, Willacy said.
One in Westchester County’s lawmaking delegation in Albany, Assemblyman George S. Latimer, D-91st District, introduced a bill in this legislative session that would raise the sale-price threshold for the 1-percent tax on homebuyers from the current $1 million to $2 million.
Enacted in 1989, the tax then applied to the rich who could afford to pay $1 million or more for residences that truly were mansions. But that taxing threshold is outdated, according to Latimer and lobbying real estate professionals.
“When that tax was first put in place, $1 million sales constituted the top 2 percent of all sales” in Westchester County, said Mercurio, who heads the 26-member delegation from White Plains that will ascend upon the state Capitol to join in a larger lobbying effort by the New York State Association of Realtors.
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