Fortune Magazine II: "Investors are bolting, developers are slashing prices, and unsold units are piling up"

I truly can't believe the MSM is so aggressively attacking and reporting with this Fortune series. My question, where have they been a month ago, 6 months ago, a year ago? It's too late now. But damn, this is the best written piece of journalism on the bubble I've read this year.

I encourage HP readers to read ever word of this series, and email these threads to everyone you know, and ask them to email them to everyone they know.

Wow. We're here. The end game. Batten down the hatches.

When the biggest bubble in human history implodes, the mother of all Ponzi schemes, the effects on the world economy and almost every living human being are going to be tremendous. We're going back to the future folks, 1929 is right around the corner...

The most troubled sector of the housing market, the one that will fall first and fastest, is the condominium market. Typically cheaper than houses and easier to buy, sell or rent out, condos are catnip for investors.

"I estimate that 80 percent of the sales in Miami went to investors at the peak of the market," says Lewis Goodkin, a consultant to condo developers. The problem is that investors tend to bolt when trouble looms.

Gary Bahadur, 32, who owns a computer networking company in Los Angeles, bought six condos in California over the past few years. Now he's putting them all up for sale.

"I'm getting out of California because it's topped out," he says, "The prices are so high that investors can no longer buy a condo and rent it to cover the mortgage."

Yet even as speculators flee, developers keep throwing up condos at a breakneck pace, in part because if they have already bought the land and poured the foundation, they have no choice but to finish the project.

Unsold condos are piling up. In the Miami area 25,000 new units are under construction, and another 25,000 are approved. Yet the Miami market absorbed only 10,500 new condos in the past decade.

It's the bright side of our gloomy outlook: The bargains are coming.