Mortgage Crisis Hits Million-Dollar Homes
March 30th, 2007Pop.
Via: Reuters:
Sheriff Leo McGuire presides over foreclosure auctions in Bergen County, New Jersey, where the bidding for a home reached $1.2 million last June — a record for one of the wealthiest counties in the nation.
Homes sold on the auction block for as much as $852,000 this month — more than quadruple the median home price in the United States. County officials believe they are close to setting another record soon.
In Troy, Michigan, Dorothy Guzek, a credit counselor since 1988, has also seen the changing face of foreclosure.
Her clients, while predominantly poor and minorities, increasingly are neither. Nowadays, homeowners holding professional careers with six-figure salaries regularly drop by her office. More and more they come from upscale Michigan communities such as Independence and Clarkston — once the summer retreat for Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Co.
“Because of the financing that was possible, so many people bought the bigger house, the million-dollar house with the bowling alley or the tennis court outside,” says Guzek, who works for GreenPath Debt Solutions, a nonprofit service based in Farmington Hills, Michigan. “People across all income brackets are having financial hardship.”
For those on the frontlines of the growing U.S. mortgage crisis, these are the early signs that the explosion of subprime loans made to mostly poorer borrowers is reaching higher ground. The damage is hitting homes financed through jumbo loans for more than $400,000 and so-called Alt-A loans that are a notch above subprime and a step below prime.
Greed is good, right?!
http://www.slate.com/id/2162989/pagenum/all/#
Haunted Mansion
A study proves that the bigger his house, the worse the CEO.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Thursday, March 29, 2007, at 6:17 PM ET
The last two bubbles—the dot-com bubble of the 1990s and the real-estate bubble of this decade—have combined to create a new culture of real-estate voyeurism. Thanks to Internet-based services and the digitization of public records, real-estate obsessives can check out how much friends and neighbors paid for their homes (domania.com), how much said homes might be worth (Zillow), and what those homes look like from above (Google Earth).