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Unless you've over leveraged your mortgage you should (right now) still be able to get out of a house in the Bay Area with most of your equity intact should you

Unless you've over leveraged your mortgage you should (right now) still be able to get out of a house in the Bay Area with most of your equity intact should you no longer be able to keep up with the payments. If you're underwater because you've used your house as an ATM you're on your own but responsible parties shouldn't be losing their deposit. This all changes if there's a huge downward swing in home prices. It's unclear if there's downward pressure whether home prices would significantly fall as opposed to flatten out . The 2008 collapse caused about 5 years of lowered home prices, bottoming out around 2010. But a lot of that was also driven by poor lending practices.

superuser2 11y ago
If there is a market correction coming in the Bay Area tech world, then for many of us layoffs and plummeting home prices are likely to happen at the same time. I accept that unemployment is a possibility, and I accept the the collapse of the value of my assets is a possibility, but I'd like to make sure they happen separately.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  From what the old timers say, house prices were pretty steady during the last bubble burst.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  However, if that happened it would be unprecedented. Seriously so. During the foreclosure crisis, which was itself unprecedented, house prices fell in a significant way for the first time, they also recovered faster than any other part of the country. A possibly more realistic scenario is a magnitude 9 quake along the Hayward fault. Something that would destroy (not merely damage) a significant chunk of infrastructure resulting in the dissolution of hundreds, if not thousands of businesses and the concomitant unemployment that would ensue. However even in that case the amount of resources available to restart are really unprecedented relative to the rest of the country.
  - mahyarm 11y ago
    An earthquake on hayward might just make housing worse as many businesses will still be around, but the housing supply dropped a lot.

superuser2 11y ago

If there is a market correction coming in the Bay Area tech world, then for many of us layoffs and plummeting home prices are likely to happen at the same time. I accept that unemployment is a possibility, and I accept the the collapse of the value of my assets is a possibility, but I'd like to make sure they happen separately.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
From what the old timers say, house prices were pretty steady during the last bubble burst.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
However, if that happened it would be unprecedented. Seriously so. During the foreclosure crisis, which was itself unprecedented, house prices fell in a significant way for the first time, they also recovered faster than any other part of the country. A possibly more realistic scenario is a magnitude 9 quake along the Hayward fault. Something that would destroy (not merely damage) a significant chunk of infrastructure resulting in the dissolution of hundreds, if not thousands of businesses and the concomitant unemployment that would ensue. However even in that case the amount of resources available to restart are really unprecedented relative to the rest of the country.
- mahyarm 11y ago
  An earthquake on hayward might just make housing worse as many businesses will still be around, but the housing supply dropped a lot.