I saw a house for sale and looked it up to see if it was foreclosure. (Our neighborhood).

Anyway, I immediately noticed a particular house on the same street had foreclosed. It caught my eye because it was one we were competing with when we tried to sell in 2006.

The story is as the market was dropping we were looking to make a rather lateral move. Take advantage of dropping prices. We carefully crafted an asking price around $500k. Anyway, these 2 houses were asking $600k and the realtors were quite nasty to us. Like WE were bringing down the neighborhood. We were just in reality. Anyway, we only listed a couple of weeks while we had a contingent offer on another home. When they found another buyer we took our home off the market. We found a couple of other nice homes for great deals, but dh and I could not agree on most of them. One of them would not take a contingent offer. So we quickly gave up. We might try again on the down side, but I think we have since decided we don't need to put more money into real estate right now. Though there were other reasons for our move. Likewise, we don't want to move once the kids start school and we are pleased with their school options right now. So, I don't think we'll be moving for the next 20 years. Not in the plans anyway.

Anyway, that's the long and short of it. There were 2 homes asking $600k and their realtors were really obnoxious to us. Well, they eventually sold for $600k!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Could blow me over with a feather. I assumed the buyers were idiots. WAY overpaid. I mean I have no idea where the realtors found these people to way overpay. It just makes no sense. (Makes less sense why these home would have appraised for that much. Just way overvalued).

& so this is what the buyers are left with:

Sale History
11/09/2007: $436,455 (foreclosure)
08/15/2006: $600,000
12/24/2002: $308,500

Sale History
11/09/2007: $414,000 (foreclosure)
10/11/2006: $600,000
07/22/2005: $589,500
07/09/2002: $312,500

Extra weird that they both foreclosed the same day???

Maybe we were the idiots. Maybe we should have found some sucker to pay $600k for our house. Yeesh! We'd have a bigger house and a lower mortgage.

So anyway, the biggest foreclosure activity around here are people who didn't do any research when they were buying a house. I would label them as suckers. Indeed. But a lot of people had to conspire against them. The realtors. The appraisers. The mortgage brokers, etc. They were all against them. That much is obvious. I could tell you there is no reason those 2 houses should have appraised anywhere near that price. So it seems rather shady. This was well after the downward slide had begun.

The whole thing was always just weird to me, and now I see how it ended up. No surprise there...