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Think things are bad? It’s about to get a whole lot worse. So said 60 Minutes last night during a piece about the mortgage meltdown and pending Grapes of Wrath-style doom that faces us all.
Long story short: A second mortgage disaster is on the horizon, and no place will be hit harder than Miami-Dade, where $2 million luxury condos have lost $1 million in value in the past year and entire subdivisions have more or less been taken over by squatters. 60 Minutes even came up with a new name for the Magic City: Repo Riviera. More after the jump.
60 Minutes talked to a repo man named Oscar Munoz, who clears out 20 to 30 foreclosed homes a day. Worst part of his job? When the family is still there.
By the time Munoz shows up at a property, where, by law, possessions cannot be seized by the bank for 24 hours, neighbors have already picked through much of what the former residents left behind.
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And then there’s Peter Zalewski of Condo Vultures Realty, who told 60 Minutes he’s trying to move 110,000 properties in South Florida, 55,000 of which are foreclosed.
Most depressing part of the entire piece? We haven’t hit bottom yet.
“This problem, the economic difficulties, are not going to be resolved in a short period of time,” says Sean Egan, who runs a credit rating firm that analyzes corporate debt. “It’s not gonna take six
months; it’s not gonna [take] 12 months. We’re looking at probably about three, four, five years, before this overhang, this supply overhang is worked through.”
