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To: John McCarthy who wrote (76989)	3/27/2008 6:42:28 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116555

maybe one thing you should consider is a lot of people who intended to flip houses may have multiple number of mortgages/houses. A lot of these flippers took advantage of ARMs since they thought they could flip them with little down payments for some big profit. I do not remember exactly, but in some states like NV, in 2006, as much as 60% of real estate buyers intended to flip for profit (so-called investment buyers)

To: John McCarthy who wrote (76989)	3/27/2008 7:08:56 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

There was a report posted here not long ago(on patron crash thread I thin) from a company that monitors 46,000,000 mortgages each quarter. So we can assume there are at least 46,000,000 mortgages. The average time of ownership in the US is around 5 years so that means the majority of mortgages are much shorter in time. Very few seasoned from 20-30 years ago are left on the books. Especially with the much lower rates these past 5 years.

To: John McCarthy who wrote (76989)	3/28/2008 3:40:02 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Re: Not arguing with you Same here. I think the main issue is that what's in the original article is incomplete and unclear. The article first states that ~5 million ARMs were reviewed, then later, as you noted, breaks that down into 3.7 million prime ARMS and 2.1 million sub ARMS which equals nearly 6 million, rather than 5. One possibility is that some of the ARMS were Alt-A and included in both totals. Regardless, it's worth noting that the average household moves about every 7 years, so that half of all mortgages are less than 7 years old (and refies takes that even lower). ARMs were running about 40% for most of that period, and there was some percentage in the earlier half, so my understanding is that the total number of homes with ARMs is closer to 12 million than 5 million. Another consideration is that, while a lot of households are living in fully paid off homes, some proportion of those are somewhere between fixer-upper and tear-down - in other words, what I'm speculating here (I haven't anything handy to verify it) is that the mean value of the housing stock for households without mortgages is significantly lower than that of the mortgaged stock. And I think the HELOC issue is also worth keeping in mind, too. The bottom line is that the percentage of the value of the housing stock that is threatened by ARMs is far higher than the 1% that article is trying to spin it as. On a side note, Including counts on renter households without including the ARMs held by their landlords, is another problem. I'm just shotgunning now, but my sense is that article (which you only posted, and certainly didn't write) was a fairly heavy handed attempt at putting a smiley face on the ARM crisis. Regards, Dan