[Porsche-O-Phile]

Lots of people are STILL buying betting on appreciation in the market. This is no doubt a lie being promulgated by sellers, the NAR and the CAR - and lenders. Every single lender and/or agent I've spoken to (with the exception of two, which are the two I'm continuing to work with) have parroted the NAR bull$hit about "there's no bubble - we should see a significant rise in values and a significant drop in interest rates over the next year or two", with little to back it up other than their opinion, which is hardly impartial or unbiased.

Unfortunately there are enough suckers buying into this hype that it does keep prices more-or-less flat, or in only slight decline rather than dropping precipitously. I don't know who these people think they're helping through their collusion - it'll only prolong the day of reckoning and when it comes, there will be all the more people in over their heads and even deeper. It makes a bad situation worse.

I have a co-worker of mine that got suckered into a $450,000 house (mind you, this is a 600 sq. ft. bungalow built in the 1920s in a ****hole neighborhood where she's the only one that speaks English as a first language). She's HORRIBLY upside-down on the property - it's listed at $380k now and she's only had one person look, who she never heard from again. Her mortgage payment is $3,600 a MONTH for this place. She's in foreclosure proceedings simply because it's too expensive (she bought into the B.S. "the market will appreciate" hype and is paying the price for it). To her benefit, the bank isn't pushing the foreclosure proceedings very hard, since they wouldn't get any more for the property than she's already signed onto it for. She's far and away not the only one in this situation I know or that I've heard of.

Point is, don't believe the party line crap about appreciation. This downturn is going to be very prolonged and very bad, only offset by how easily the NAR and company can manipulate the very naive or very stupid or very desperate. Right now though, I'm finding (sadly and a bit shockingly) that there really ARE enough stupid people out there to offset what would otherwise be a far more rapid decline in pricing.