Drawing ping-pong ball for a house ?

In his 25 years as an estate agent in Stockton, Kevin Moran had never seen anything like it as seemingly limitless bank loans sent house prices rocketing.

Kevin Moran
US real estate agents have seen the market shift quickly

“It was crazy”, he says. “People felt that if they didn’t make a high enough offer on a house, it would be gone.

“Instead of saying ‘What do you want to do on a Saturday? Let’s go to the park’, they’d say ‘Let’s go buy a house’”.

At the height of the buying frenzy, in 2006, Will Trawick was selling new homes for a Stockton developer.

Faced with crowds of a hundred buyers, bank loans in hand, all chasing the 20 houses he might have on offer, he organised bingo-style lotteries.

“We had ping-pong balls with numbers, just like you’d see on a TV show”, Mr Trawick recalls.

“Everybody would have a number. We’d put the ping-pong balls in, spin it and, you know ‘Number 22! Yoo-hoo!’ They’d jump up and yell, come on up and pick which home they wanted, and leave a deposit cheque”.

Lending frenzy : courtesy of BBC NEWS.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 1:02 am and is filed under ZMisc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.