
Beware HGTV’s House-Flipping Fantasy Loop. Look Deeper, and It Gets Ugly - jseliger
http://www.vulture.com/2017/09/the-ugliness-behind-hgtv-never-ending-fantasy-loop.html
======
DrScump
"A recent, worrisome working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic
Research reported on the tinder of the last conflagration: the national sense
that housing prices were going up every day and that there was no way that a
buyer’s reach could exceed his grasp. It’s true that bankers made loans to
Americans wildly unqualified for them — but the notion that buyers on the
lower end of credit distribution began to default in unprecedented numbers
isn’t accurate. In fact, the rate of default in the subprime market throughout
the bubble and the bust remained steady compared with before the crisis. It
was buyers from the top and middle top who account for the skyrocketing rate
of default — and it wasn’t that they were buying bigger family homes that they
couldn’t afford. It was that they were buying additional houses to flip for a
profit, and when holding on to them stopped making financial sense, and with
no personal and emotional connection to them, they began walking away in huge
numbers."

