Real Estate Values, going down...down...down........

There's an Internet site where you can check the value of your home. It's Zillow.com. As the real estate bubble glided up I checked the site often and watched as the value of my home gradually increased by nearly several hundred thousand dollars. I was pretty pleased with myself, I must admit.


These days I check the site just about once a month. For quite sometime, my little frame house...built in 1949 (a small, cheap place in a really nice neighborhood)...held steady at about $425,000. I knew it was in a great area but I didn't understand how its value could stay so high considering the bubble burst beginning in mid December, 2005. We're talking almost three years ago.

Well, I spoke too soon. Suddenly, the Zillow people found my home just like Google Earth did. Talk about a bubble bursting....whoa! We're talking a nuclear explosion here. My home plunged $75,000 in value in six months at the beginning of the year. Lately, it's been going down $10,000 or so each month.

Today, my home lost $2,000 on the site. That's right, TWO-THOUSAND-DOLLARS! That's 23 weeks pay at the rate I received at my first job as a newspaper reporter. I've decided that rather than list it with a Realtor, with action like that it belongs on the stock exchange where I could make some money on the down movement. This morning my house was worth $296,000. This evening it's worth $294,000. Now, I understand why so many people are walking away from homes. I'm beginning to understand the whole deal. What an idiot I've been. Why keep making payments on a $375,000 mortgage when your property is only worth $296,000?

As there may be good reason for abandoning such a poor investment and taking the credit hit, there are just as many reasons for hanging in there and making good on a promise. Yep, a novel idea. I promised, in writing, to pay the mortgage as odd as that may be to hear. I'm sure there are a lot of people who feel the same way and would do so if they could afford to. But in many cases the interest rate has adjusted to an impossible payment amount.

More than my promise, a house is more than an asset. It's home, it's a place where I come home to and can get away from everything. There's no place like it. ET fought to get back to it in the heavens. My home is many times more than a mortgage or anything else that could be placed on it. I've lived in massively larger and more modern homes but the one I'm in now has been more of a home than all the others. Perhaps I've changed and made it that way.

So its value to others may be going down, way...way down. It's value to me, the value of my word, its value as the one place on the entire face of the earth I can come to and be king, cannot be put into dollars.

A lot of people may have their home foreclosed on...be kicked out of that one little corner of the planet that is theirs and theirs only. But your heart can never be foreclosed on. The place we call home may change but home never changes. Money can't buy a home. Home in the truest sense of the word can't be mortgaged.

My house is my home and that place I call home. But if I ever lose it it won't be lost. It'll just move along with me, somewhere deep inside where the process server will never be admitted and civil judgments are meaningless.

Now, let me go see how much value I lost at Zillow.com while writing this narrative. If you're behind in your house payments, I'm praying with you. Hang in there and don't be afraid. You can never lose your home!