By Mark Walters

If you’ve owned real estate for the last two or three years chances are you feel like a financial genius. In many areas real estate values have climbed to dizzying heights.

I hope you have resisted the temptation of easy money home equity loans. If so, you’re now sitting on a big, fat profit. It may have entered your mind that the big run up in real estate prices could be nearing a peak and those values could come barreling down. Oh no! That would mean your big, fat profit could become thin as a rail in a New York minute. That kind of financial weight loss you just don’t need.

This article is not meant to promote the idea that we’ve all experienced the effects of a real estate bubble and that inevitably that bubble must burst. That could be the case, but honestly, who really knows? But if a reversal is ahead, what can you do to avoid watching the value of your home plunge and your equity profit vanish?

Across the country, in the real estate markets that have been the hottest, some homeowners are selling and temporarily moving into apartments. They feel that they are selling at the peak of the real estate cycle and it could be years before they ever have a chance to sell for as much profit as they can get now. They just could not tolerate doing nothing and then watch a major decline in their net worth.

Their thinking is that over the next 24 months or so, interest rates will go up. If interest rates go up one or two percent many people will be priced out of the home buying market. That means less demand for homes and less demand means lower prices. That and other factors could result in falling home values. They want to pull their big profit out now, bank it and wait for prices to fall.

As real estate prices move to the lower end of the cycle, these sellers will then buy another home. In a way this will allow them to have their cake and eat it too. One of their choices will be to buy a home equivalent to the one they sold, but at a lower price. In this case they can allocate the remaining portion of their profit to other investments.

Another option will be to use all of the cash they received from the sale of their original home to buy a more expensive house.

Still another choice would be to sell and take their money to another area where real estate prices have not skyrocketed and buy a much nicer home. Family and employment obligations prevent most people from doing that.

What could go wrong with any of these plans? Home prices could just continue to climb. Then these sellers would be left sitting on the side lines, unable to even afford the house they just sold. Even if home prices just stayed flat without declining, they would still be stuck. The cost of an equivalent home, plus buying expenses would exceed the profit they earned from the sale of their original home.

The other challenge to their plan is what to do with that big, fat profit once they had it hand? Can they find a safe investment that could earn more than real estate? Due to the effect of inflation the buying power of the cash would diminish every day if they just sat on it.

Finally, you can do as most home owners certainly will. Nothing! That’s fine as long as you have not refinanced all of your equity out of the property. Then if values drop you will be “up side down”. That means you will owe more on your mortgage than the home is worth. That thought may scare some home owners into selling just to get out even.

Now that you’ve come to the end of part one of this article you are ready for the perfect solution to this potential situation, right? You certainly are an optimist. Sorry, not enough room here for solutions.

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