Erin Attardi breaks through the Sacramento bubble...and visits San Diego. Ok so it was a working trip...

Well, as much as I love Sacramento, I was not bummed about leaving our foggy and cold weather last week in order to attend the California Association of Realtors winter conference and attend the C.A.R. Board of Directors meetings -- in sunny San Diego. In fact, it was about 80 degrees and sunny there all week.

Ironically, as beautiful as San Diego is, I had very little time to enjoy it. Most of our committee and board meetings were held in these stuffy, windowless rooms at the San Diego Manchester Hyatt, and they started early and went late. I did walk through the Gaslamp Quarter for a couple hours one afternoon...but that was about all the fresh air I got. Even my daily running regimen and half-marathon training was spent on the treadmill (mainly because it was dark by the time we were done for the day, and I didn't want to run in unfamiliar territory in the dark by myself).

So what did I do down there, you may ask? Well, in short -- as a current member of the C.A.R. Board of Directors, I attended meetings, meetings, and more meetings.

Did you know that the local, state and national associations of Realtors work to defend consumer private property rights? Lemme guess - your answer was no. Most people (heck, many Realtors for that matter) are not aware that we do this. We are constantly out trying to convince lawmakers that proposing pieces of legislation that do things like add more taxes to real estate transactions, require certain home retrofits at the point of sale, eliminate the mortgage interest tax deduction, and things of that nature are BAD ideas....while at the same time trying to convince lawmakers that proposing pieces of legislation that do things like prohibit advanced fee loan modification contracts, extend forgiveness of paying income tax on "phantom income" created by short sales, give additional rights to tenants of foreclosed homes, and things of that nature are GOOD ideas.

So without going into all of the boring details, we worked all week strategizing things like that. There were some interesting forums and roundtable discussions regarding issues involving short sales, foreclosure, appraisal fraud, etc. Very productive...