Hope, Faith and Equity

Have you ever seen someone tease a dog? It doesn't take long to turn a perfectly friendly pooch into a nasty, mean mongrel.

That's exactly what happy-days-are-here-again real estate forecasts do to me. When I hear that home values are finally going to go up, I get all excited. I look up the value of my home online and figure out how far I have to go to get above water (I'm deeper underwater than the Titanic). Even though it will take years to restore any positive equity in my home, I feel excited. At last, things will be going in the right direction. I do a little happy dance and I take my wife Felicity out to dinner at IHOP to celebrate.

Then I wait. And wait. And wait some more, checking my home's value every day, only to find out that it was a false alarm. Sales hadn't turned out like the experts thought they would. Or a new bunch of foreclosures screwed things up. Or maybe they hadn't calculated something quite right and got a little too optimistic. The first time this happened, I was disappointed. The second time, I was annoyed. By the sixth time, I had turned into an attack dog, foaming at the mouth.

So you can imagine how I reacted when not one, but two bona fide real estate experts announced the other day that THE RECOVERY HAS BEGUN. Oh boy. But in two weeks, my home value actually bumped up a little. In six weeks, it was up even more and by the end of two months, I was recouping lost ground for the first time in six years!