Daily Real Estate News  |  March 25, 2008  |   Million Dollar Homes at Bargain Prices
Now could be a great time to buy a million dollar home in a nice area at a bargain price.

Forbes magazine has identified Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., Marco Island, Fla., Castle Rock, Colo., Annandale, Va., and Bergen County, N.J., as five high-end areas where million dollar foreclosures abound.

Traditionally good borrowers with strong credit scores previously purchased a lot of these homes. In many cases, the foreclosure has come about because the homes are now worth significantly less than the inflated prices the owners originally paid. The homes have sunk into negative equity situations and the previous owners don’t want to make the payments, so they walk away, says Wendell Cox, founder of Demographia, a housing research company.

But foreclosures are not all bad news for the high-end real estate market. Nelson Gonzalez, a practitioner with Esslinger-Wooten-Maxwell, specializing in Miami Beach, says that the rash of foreclosures in Florida, which has the second-highest foreclosure rate in the country, has driven interest from out-of-town and foreign buyers looking to snag a deal.

"They think that every house in Florida is in foreclosure," he says. "The offers we're getting are fairly decent, but the sellers are not coming down yet."

Source: Forbes, Matt Woolsey (03/13/08)