We get so desensitized to real estate increases and decreases that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that this isn’t Monopoly money we’re talking about. $50k is the equivalent of a year’s take home pay for a lot of people.
$50,000 represented a 25% loss in value for a home purchased in 1989, that being the accrued loss over probably 5 years. That $50,000 was the maximum loss during the entire downturn of the last RE bust. Now it’s just a drop in the bucket.
People had a really difficult time recovering from those losses back then because $50k was a lot of money. One can only wonder how many of our current FBs are going to be able to recover after suffering their losses by the time they start exceeding $200k.