This lady in Dublin believed the realtors, believed the media, and believed in the "housing ladder". And she's lost $100,000 already, and counting

So many lied in order to earn a commission.

So many believed, for so many reasons.

The commissions - they got pocketed, with the realtors and mortgage brokers making out like bandits.

The buyers? Well, quite frankly, they got f*cked.

Should have listened to HP.

Housing Woes in U.S. Spread Around Globe

DUBLIN — The collapse of the housing bubble in the United States is mutating into a global phenomenon, with real estate prices swooning from the Irish countryside and the Spanish coast to Baltic seaports and even parts of northern India.

In Ireland, Spain, Britain and elsewhere, housing markets that soared over the last decade are falling back to earth. Property analysts predict that some countries, like this one, will face an even more wrenching adjustment than that of the United States, including the possibility that the downturn could become a wholesale collapse.

FLASH: ABN Bank sees housing crash on a global scale, reports UK 50% overvalued, USA 25% overvalued

Oh dear god, this is going to end nasty.

You'll never see this type of leverage, this type of credit stupidity and this type of insane worldwide asset overvaluation again in your lifetime.

The biggest bubble in recorded human history. Followed, of course, by the biggest crash. You think the US is having a nice housing crash? That's just an appetizer. The main course is being prepared here in Europe, where speculation-mad, over-leveraged, housing-crazed Brits have fueled a European-wide real estate frenzy. And then the music stopped.

Get popcorn and settle in. The show is about to start.

ABN fears world housing crash - Soaring borrowing costs could spark a housing slump on a 'global scale', investment bank ABN Amro has warned.

Families have taken on 'unsustainably large' mortgages, leaving them vulnerable to the sharp increases in bond yields and official interest rates seen in recent weeks, wrote economist Dominic White.

Britain is one of the most exposed markets thanks to rampant speculation over the past decade, though it is by no means alone.

Claims that shortfalls in the supply of new homes will lead to an inexorable rise in UK property prices in coming decades have 'as much credibility as Britney Spears' latest comeback,' he wrote.

'The decline in global interest rates has now been largely reversed,' White said. 'Rising real interest rates could result in greater economic volatility. I believe this leaves housing markets vulnerable to a correction on a global scale.'

Although fears for the health of the US housing market have captured headlines, the degree of over-valuation is more 'severe' in Britain, Australia, Spain and Ireland, ABN Amro calculates.

A note by the bank in April found that UK residential property is 50% overvalued, whereas US houses are 25% too expensive.

Spanish housing crash: Ghost towns, inflated appraisals, wild oversupply and rampant speculation. Dios Mio!

Take five minutes of your life and read this whole article on the housing crash underway in Spain. Substitute "Phoenix" or "Miami" or "San Diego" or a plethora of American cities for "Spain" and you'll see this housing bubble went worldwide.

It all seems so damn obvious now. So damn obvious.

HP'ers, you are witnessing in real time the biggest financial collapse in the history of the world. And we're just getting started.

Ghost Towns Appear in Spain as Decade-Long Boom Ends

Spanish builders constructed 750,000 houses and apartments last year, more than France and Germany combined, while annual demand runs about 60 percent of that, according to the Finance Ministry.

Spanish buyers may face an even higher risk of losing their property because housing prices are based on appraisals rather than actual sales, and appraisers often inflate values.

``We live in a country where everybody understands that appraisals are poetry,'' said Jesus Encinar, chief executive officer and founder of Idealista.com, a property Web site that tracks existing home prices in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. ``Bankers have said to me, `Why do you care if the appraisal is fake? It will be true in the future.'''

``The problem here is that people have this unshakeable conviction that prices simply cannot fall,'' Encinar said.

Just as developers profited from first-time buyers, they also have benefited from investors who bought property in anticipation prices would rise.

The result has been that builders were fooled about the true demand, said Bernardos at the University of Barcelona.

In Sanchinarro, Las Tablas and similar developments, ``a flood of speculators bought up apartments thinking they would make a killing as the boom continued,'' said Bernardos. ``Now big developers are competing with these very speculators for sales as they flee the market.''