Oh NO doubt these kinds of shenanigans have been going on a while. But at least during the depths of the Great Recession you didn’t see them so aggressive like now. And there was not really this sense of urgency by these people that not so long ago recently defaulted to buy a “new home”. And I guess since there is not much pre-existing inventory in many cities the new stuff is their only route to home ownership again.
And now the builders are eating their cake too. They’ve been able to strip out many of the upgrades and people are paying more than ever to get all these “upgrades” where during the bubble it seemed like they almost had to include many of them. They are charging them a fortune. I’m not sure if you saw that Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago about people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in upgrades. I believe they used one couple in Irvine as an example.
The more things change the more they stay the same……
