THE INFLUENCE GAME: Business Aided by Jobless Bill

Emergency help for the jobless will be a huge windfall for Realtors, homebuilders, mortgage bankers and others, and that's no accident.

FILE - In this Oct. 20, 2009 file photo, a home with a reduced price for sale in Carmel, Ind. neighborhood is shown. Buying a home is about to get cheaper for a whole new crop of homebuyers _ $6,500 cheaper.(AP Photo/Michael Conroy, file)

(AP)

Those industries have spent months and millions of dollars making the case for $20 billion in tax cuts for homebuyers and businesses to help create jobs and revive a sluggish housing market. Their lobbying campaign paid off Thursday when Congress voted to pass the tax breaks as part of a broader extension of unemployment benefits. President Barack Obama signed the bill into law Friday.

The legislation, which provides up to 20 weeks in additional pay to more than 1 million people who have lost or are in danger of losing jobless aid, passed by overwhelming bipartisan margins.

It also would extend until the spring a tax credit of up to $8,000 for first-time homebuyers that had been slated to expire at the end of the month, add smaller credits for some who own a home, and make the money available to wealthier people. The popular tax break is estimated to cost $10.8 billion over the next decade, and businesses that stand to benefit have flooded Capitol Hill in recent weeks to push it through.

Realtors mobilized their 1.2 million members across the country to write and call their representatives and senators to urge extension of the credit, warning that failure to do so could cause this year's housing market uptick to grind to a halt.

Several dozen of them flew to Washington recently to visit members of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee to press the point. In case they didn't get the message, Realtors sent more than 500,000 letters to Capitol Hill and made nearly 13,000 phone calls to Senate offices last weekend to corral support in advance of a key procedural vote on Monday, according to a spokesman.

"There are Realtors everywhere who understand the impact of the tax credit to moving the housing market," said the National Association of Realtors' Lucien Salvant.