Stronger Together: Building Coalitions in REALTOR® Advocacy

BY LISA MAY, DIRECTOR OF ADVOCACY AND PUBLIC POLICY, MARYLAND REALTORS®

When to lead on issues and when to save your political capital for another day is a difficult decision for advocates. It is certainly more art than science. Fortunately, there is a third option to help REALTORS® bridge the gap between action and inaction to achieve legislative wins: coalition building.

Maryland REALTORS® successfully used coalitions to engage in two large policy debates in 2025. Let’s look at how this approach produced our desired outcomes.

Strength in Numbers

When the Maryland State Archives announced a new user fee for access to the land records database in late March, many industries set out to estimate the impacts on their members. For REALTORS®, those direct costs paled in comparison to those of the title and legal industries, where entire business models were based upon heavy use of land records information. Using that measure, we didn’t have a compelling argument for grave harm to our members.

However, that was not the only calculation that mattered. Real estate is unique in how multiple services and service providers come together to produce a single result. As more industries came forward with estimates on usage and projected costs, it was clear that standing for just REALTOR® interests alone meant obscuring the true impact of the proposal on consumers.

Policymakers are unlikely to act when businesses report increases of a few hundred dollars. That changes when you can demonstrate that those relatively small charges result in thousands of dollars on new home construction or property sales. Only through shared information from lenders, settlement providers, engineers, appraisers, and others could we formulate what a home buyer or seller would eventually pay when land records fees were passed on in a real estate transaction.

The other benefit of working with a coalition was the coordination of efforts to push back on the fee proposal. Unlike other policy issues, this did not proceed through traditional legislative or regulatory processes. The only tool at our disposal was political pressure. As unique organizations, we each had a network of contacts within the Administration, the General Assembly, fellow lobbyists, and other trade associations to leverage in support of our position. It allowed us to reach much farther than any individual group could on its own.

Not only did this coalition effort result in pulling the land records fee from immediate consideration, but it also bolstered our relationships with those other industries. This positions us well for future issues where our interests may align or in negotiating with those same groups when interests diverge.

Under the Radar

The second opportunity for coalition participation came during this year’s budget debates. While REALTORS® were prepared for full-scale battle following 2024’s introduction of an across-the-board sales tax on all professional services, it was quickly apparent that real estate interests would not be the central part of the Governor’s proposed budget or key alternatives offered in the House and Senate.

With that in mind, full-scale opposition from REALTORS® was not the correct approach. As they say, if everything is an emergency, then nothing is. If REALTORS® were to treat every issue as five-alarm fire, not only do we burn valuable resources that could be put to better use, but we also lose the ability to make legislators pay attention to the truly catastrophic issues for real estate when they arise.

More dangerously for us, strong opposition to a bill which largely excluded real estate could backfire. Everyone in Annapolis was searching for revenues to close a $3.3 billion budget gap. There was a real possibility that if our policymakers were going to feel the wrath of the real estate industry no matter what actions they took on the budget, then they might as well reap the financial windfalls that a property tax, transfer tax, or services tax would provide to state coffers.

Again, this is where coalitions helped us to engage on an issue without taking the lead. The Maryland Chamber of Commerce launched a robust campaign to protect business interests during this year’s budget debates. As members of the Chamber, Maryland REALTORS® was one of the first organizations to offer a significant financial investment in that campaign. By doing so, we could support the broader business community without being the face of opposition and caught in the budget crosshairs.

In the world of advocacy, fight or flight is not the only policy option. Strategic participation in advocacy coalitions is a middle path that produces results for REALTOR® interests.