Las Vegas called 'mortgage fraud ground zero'

[flashl]

LAS VEGAS — In the shadow of Sunrise Mountain, where Rolling Hills Drive turns into Gold Mine Drive, a plain two-story home sits unoccupied, like thousands of other houses here in southern Nevada.

Some of these empty homes have "for sale" signs. Others bear signs saying "foreclosure." Authorities say hundreds of them, including this one on Rolling Hills Drive, should have a different sign out front, one that reads "fraud."

Prosecutors contend this house was sold last year to a straw buyer as part of a sprawling mortgage fraud perpetrated by a husband-and-wife team involving 277 properties in greater Las Vegas.

...

To the untrained eye, the size, scope and sophistication of the alleged scheme is noteworthy. But to the FBI in Las Vegas, the problem is the opposite: In recent years, there have been so many mortgage fraud cases, the bureau and local prosecutors have had to establish a special task force to combat the problem.

USA Today

[Warpy]

1. HGTV house porn

often featured people in Las Vegas.

I always asked myself just who the hell these people were, the young families plunking down the kind of change it should take for a million dollar property with pool, movie theater, and acres of granite countertops. Were there that many drug dealers or investment bankers in the world?

Now we know. They, unless they were actors used to show these white elephants, got taken to the cleaners by fraudsters offering the American dream for no money down, balloon payments 5 years later after you've gotten rich quick.

Nobody got rich quick under this administration unless they were born rich and connected and now those loans all look like the fraud they were all the time. Builders and brokers walked away with hefty profits. The rest of us got the big GOP screw.

[izquierdista]

2. I disagree!

Up until about 2003, Las Vegas had a very affordable housing market. Land costs were cheap and young families could find houses and jobs in the gaming industry were plentiful. True, the low to no down payments required meant that anyone could buy a house, and with 6000 people a month moving to the valley, it seemed like everyone did. People could buy in and build equity and the ones that sold before the market tanked did all right.

I sold out in the summer of 2005 and have been renting ever since. There is still some shake out to be done, but once the average house price is back down to about 10,000 times the average worker's wage, prices will level out and normalcy will return to the market.

[Xenotime]

3. People wanted to live as if they had hit the jackpot.

Which...they hadn't.