The California Department of Real Estate reports that real estate salesperson exams are down by 25% from a year ago while real estate broker exams have risen by 25%.  Salesperson licensees were renewed by 78% of licensees as of November 30, 2006, compared with 82% from a year ago. Real estate broker renewals were 89% and 88% for the same period.  Overall, the total number of licensees has risen by 10% over the past year.

Housing market is hot in Mexico – There were 600,000 houses built in Mexico last year.  The boom began in 2000 when the government started a push to help first-time buyers, making available millions of dollars through mortgage lenders.  Though the program was aimed at Mexicans in Mexico, it is Mexicans in the United States that have helped the housing market to take off.  Some Mexican lenders, like Su Casita, have offices in the U.S. (Denver, Dallas and Chicago).  Mexican home builder Desarrolladora Homex expects revenue to grow 17-20% in 2007 as it ramps up construction of its mostly entry-level homes and expands further into the mid-level range.  The government is helping to keep the market growing, calling for government and private lenders to issue six million mortgages over a six-year term and calling for higher subsidies to help Mexico’s poorest buy homes.  Low interest rates (by Mexican standards), down to about 10%, and demographics are driving the boom.  (N.A.R.)

Net Neutrality:  The idea of net neutrality is that the internet is open to all that are able to access it and that everybody able to access the internet has equal availability to services and information.  Net neutrality principles have guided the development of the Internet to date.  These principles call upon designers of the individual networks, that together make up the Internet, to create their piece of the Internet in a manner that allows any computer connected to the network to send information to any other computer on the Internet with minimal interference.  A network designed to be perfectly neutral does not discriminate against any other network, hardware, software, language, culture, disability, or types of data.

The 109^th Congress took up H.R. 5252, the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006 in order to overhaul and regulate the nation’s phone, cable, Internet, and television industries.  The major sticking point which caused H.R. 5252 to never get out of the 109^th Congress was over “net neutrality”.  Net neutrality is the debate over whether Internet service providers should be regulated in the same manner as a public utility or whether they should be allowed to continue as a free market enterprise.

The issue of net neutrality will reappear during the 110^th Congress in another major reform attempt of the U.S. telecommunications industries.  Those supporting more extensive net neutrality language argue that without legislation, net neutrality will become a thing of the past.  They charge that the June 2005 U.S. Supreme Court “Brand X” ruling allows broadband providers to engage in (1) non-neutral practices such as blocking, slowing or degrading access to networks that compete with the broadband provider’s own and (2) instituting pricing “tiers” for different levels of network access used by content providers.

Opponents of more prescriptive net neutrality language argue that detailed net neutrality rules would (1) impose regulatory burdens on Internet participants that will stifle innovation, (2) ignore the competitive pressure broadband providers face, (3) prohibit necessary network security practices and (4) shift network expansion costs to consumers.