Flutterby™! : equity deals

Last night had a conversation with someone who's gotten into the whole real estate thing in a big way, from the side of wanting to become a mortgage broker or somesuch. She was talking about a deal where two couples owned a house for about a year, one of the couples had decided they couldn't hack the payments anymore and walked away from it, and the other couple was considering defaulting on the place. She was trying to put together some sort of situation where another person would come in and take over payments in exchange for half the future equity.

To put it another way, someone who couldn't pass through even today's relaxed credit checks to assume a couple of hundred thousand dollars in debt on the assumption that real estate was going to continue to appreciate exponentially.

Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but the mortgage crisis is overwhelming credit counselors (Via Rebecca Blood).