Greg Snow - Southwest Florida Real Estate Expert provides real estate services to Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Sanibel and Captiva Islands

As mentioned here before, Jackson Browne has a song, "Running on Empty", which hosts a refrain of" in 69 I was 21, and I called the world my own", and it may be the point of reference of many of my stream of conscious thoughts on todays current events. Some years later, the Rolling Stones had a song named "Under My Thumb", that really rose to epic proportions in the movie "Gimme Shelter", http://www.imbd.com that closely parallels our local real estate market and many others nationwide.

The movie was gripingly intense at the free concert in 1969 at the Altamont Speedway in California, with the Hell's Angels hired to provide security (kinda like our Congress and Legislature working on our security). Forty plus years later, running on empty and under my thumb have become catch phrases for dearth of institutional lending and negative home equity here in Lee County, Florida (also in Altamont Speedway's state). The current projections for our area to recover into the positive neighborhood is 2020 (sounds like great eyesight). In the state where Altamont is, projections are for 14 years.

There is also a "new" wisdom that is beginning to take hold in many of the minds of homeowners who are under the water. Many surveys no longer are able to correctly interpret the real mood of our fellow home owners. Once upon a time, long ago, and not so far away, most owners of their homes would do most anything to keep their properties. Today, with 11-12 million homes with mortgages (2 million in Florida alone), are facing negative equity in their homes (some have lost 50-60% of previous value), and are seriously considering a strategic default and discontinue sending in their mortgage payments. Financially it makes sense and facing bad credit for awhile, they still feel in the long run it is the right thing to do. Some even justify the manuever by declaring the banks and their regulatory mis-management get a free ride with the bailouts, while the homeowner faces paying back money that will be years away from re-establishing fair market value in their homes.