Well that really sucks.

Ugh. All I want to do is sell my house. Well, not all – I’m still holding out for the offer to open for Clutch on tour. Selling this house is a big priority right now, though. It doesn’t really matter when – I graduate next May, and don’t take the bar exam until July, so I’m fine with sticking around. It would be better for us, though, to sell the house early and have to live in an apartment than to not sell the house and have to stay in my crappy job ad infinitum. This brings us to our sordid tale of woe known as the current mortgage market.

Let’s start from the beginning and bore you with details. As much as I would love to blame George Bush for the current state of things (I’m sure he’s got something to do with it, right?) the fault can be placed on the shoulders of idiot lenders that gave mortgages to people that really shouldn’t have had them. Said idiot lenders were handing mortgages to other idiots who would then idiotically buy houses that they couldn’t afford. Due to an extremely sharp rise in the prices of houses, a lot of these houses were actually selling for considerably more than they were worth.

Suddenly, the terms on many adjustable-rate mortgages came due. Like a shotgun, people that were barely making interest-only payments at 5% or less now had to pay three times what they were paying before, due to a higher rate and having to pay principal. (Lost? Sorry if I’m skipping definitions, I’m trying to be brief. Heh.) Long story short, these people (and there are LOTS of them) couldn’t make their payments. Their houses went into foreclosure, and are now being sold dirt cheap by the banks that took them back.

What does this mean? It means that in my neighborhood (and likely yours too) there are 47 houses for sale in a 6-block radius and 30 of the 47 are foreclosed properties. This produces an effect that makes me want to go on a violent rampage: Person A has a house for sale at $200,000. Person B got their house (similar in every way to person A’s) foreclosed upon because they couldn’t afford it. Bank C sells person B’s house for $30,000. Person D, a generic consumer, sees two identical houses, one for $200,000 and another for $30,000. Yeah. Tough choice.

As a result prices of houses everywhere go sharply downward. (Yes, I know there’s more to it. I’m simplifying here. There’s a story, after all.) The infuriating result of this is that when Kerry and I contacted a realtor, she said that our house could sell for a maximum of about $60,000 less than what we want for it.

That’s a lot. That’s out of the question.

There’s more to it than that, even. I may very well be projecting here, but I’ve got some severe misgivings about the realtor we spoke to. See, I know that she’s in a difficult financial situation (because I’m a snoop, a spy, and a person who knows people), and I know that she’s done some kind of shady things in the past. I’m thinking that she wants to sell a house immediately, because she wants a smaller commission now rather than a big one later. It might be wishful thinking on our part, but either way, yeah…not gonna be going with her, I’m thinkin’.

Wait, why did we call her in the first place? Because she's a very nice person who was our agent when purchasing the house, and we wanted to see what she could do. Yeah, not so much.