I’m trying to avoid becoming paralyzed with anticipation with the primaries tonight, so I’ll talk about the housing market…

Anecdotally I’ve heard from friends and people I know that here in Philly, that housing prices are dropping, quickly.
One story I heard recently from a trusted voice told me about a 12% drop in assessment value on a property thats trying to be sold. And thats a drop in estimated value thats happened in the last 3 months!!!

And then I read about people in florida, who own multimillion dollar homes, who have simply STOPPED paying their mortgages!!! *sputter*. Apparently with the break in the market, and the massive drop in price, people can’t sell their homes, since they’re ‘underwater’ so to speak (when the house is worth less in market value then the amount of debt you’re in to own in, so even if you sold it tomorrow, you’d still have a mortgage payment on the house). And the banks cant do anything about it because of how buried they are in foreclosures and other credit collapse related issues.

Read on!

I have followed several of the homes that my wife and I were interested in a few years back, they are all on the market now. What is shocking, that in each and every case, I have been told by brokers and banks that the owners, have ceased paying their mortgages in some cases for nearly 2 years and have continued to occupy these homes. Now, these are homes in excess of $2,000,000 in the very best neighborhoods in South Florida. Brokers have added that these buyers further complicated things by putting huge home equity lines on top of their mortgages and now have no possibility of selling their homes for amounts needed to cover their accumulated debt.

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/03/foreclosure-pro.html.

As the author of that post states clearly… “WOW!”

I’m equally glad I didn’t buy a house in the last year when it became a slight possibility, and that I’m not neck deep in that mess right now.

From the comments of that post, someone states that when the NYTIMES runs this story in the next few months, we’ll see a nuclear summer… I know what that means, but I’m really scared to find out.