“The Biggest Investment Most Persons Ever Make” 0
So has sung the real estate industry for decades.
The flaw in that statement is that someone’s primary dwelling–house, condo, coop, whatever–is first a place to live. Any “investment potential” is a nice side-effect. Persons who allow themselves to be deluded into thinking of their houses as “investments” to be day-traded err grievously.
The brokers who sold the houses, with no or minimal down payments and funky time-bomb mortgages, promising “investment returns,” knew this. But left it out of the sales pitch.
An additional 2.2 million borrowers will be underwater if home prices decline another 5 percent, First American, a Santa Ana, California-based seller of mortgage and economic data, said in a report today. Households with negative equity or near it account for a quarter of all mortgage holders.
