Category — Tax Credit

The National Association of Realtors® (NAR) and many other interested parties won their fight for Congress to expand and extend the tax credit for first time homebuyers. To date, the tax credit is responsible for generating $22 billion and offering two million people home ownership with a tax incentive.  

As the President of the National Association of Realtors (NAR) Charles McMillan pointed out in his speech to Capitol Hill, the real estate industry is the key industry to a stable economy. People may think of the real estate industry as the buying and selling of properties but there are a lot more professionals, businesses and industries connected to the real estate industry than real estate agents alone.

The new homebuyer tax credit is different than the homebuyer tax credits that have existed in the past. This time it is $8,000 instead of $7,500 and first time homebuyers do not have to pay it back. In the past, it was more or less like a loan, which meant that first time homebuyers had to pay it back in due time. This didn’t serve as much of an incentive for the fact that these first time homebuyers would have their new house payment, their regular bills, and this “tax credit loan” that they had to pay back.