Just curious about how accurate the estimates of shadow inventory really are, and where the info comes from…
When my husband and I recently interviewed realtors for the sale of our house, both came to the appointment assuming that we were underwater. They looked at our buying price in late 2006 and they seemed to have information either about our downpayment or our initial loans. We had bought with 15% down, and had taken a second mortgage for roughly $30K, which was the other 5% of a downpayment. In this way, we avoided PMI. We’re not sure where/how they got the info.
Anyway, neither agent seemed to know that we had paid off that 5% second mortgage about 2 years into our ownership. So, someone looking at us might have thought that we were “underwater” but in reality we weren’t. I wonder how many people like us are out there…
And yes, we sold a few weeks ago and we took a loss overall, losing some of our original downpayment, the second, and any of the money we had put into some improvements. Boo! However, after all was said and done, we still walked away with about $60K. [even if I consider our monthly payments as just “rent”, I think we probably lost about $70-75K overall… Sad, but we wanted to get out and move up before prices and interest rates start to rise.]
