i suspect this might be the thinking:
Maybe it will allow the banks to work through foreclosures and REOs already in the pipeline. I made 3 bids for condos in Tampa, and all of them fell through because the banks' employees were just too swamped to make a reasonable effort.
but this is my fear:
It also will delay the necessary clearing out of all the defaulted loans that need to get resolved before the market down there can get moving again.
2nd week of october, like clockwork the weather here has finally broken, summer turns off as quickly as the real estate market. i went for a walk late last night in the full moon, a nice breeze, moderate temperature, humidity down to about 57% (low for this time of year), the air couldn't have been more clear. the first walk since summer started that didn't end with a sweaty t-shirt.
what made my walk a bit surreal was that among the more than 300 houses i passed, i found only 6 with "for sale" signs. i happen to be in a fairly stable neighborhood, an oasis in the middle of calamity. still, we did have our fair shair of foreclosures.
when i got back home i went onto realtytrac.com and checked out their disaster map. sure enough, there are just three bank owned properties here and a scattering of preforeclosures. i know of a few that had sold for about 40% off their high. my two neighbors across the street from me sold their nonforeclosed homes similarly. regardless, we sold our foreclosures already. the owners & lenders both took a bath and moved on.
i'll wait it out longer but when i came home from my walk i almost had the feeling that i could put my house up for sale now as the sign would not be lost in a sea of signs that would likely still be there were a moratorium to delay the process. i'm not against moratoriums especially in times like these. but if my intention was to clean up a system, i'd shut down construction of new units, which are still being built before i'd stop the sale of existing.
to see the bottom of a river, better to dam upstream and pump out the water on this side, than to dam the river downstream and let water build behind it.