Remember youwalkaway.com? The idea there is that you stop making your mortgage payments but you can live in your house for 8 months or more before finally being evicted. Well now Barry Ritholtz has found a couple of articles, in BusinessWeek and the Chicago Tribune, which detail a much less rational behavior: homeowners moving out the minute they get their first nastygram from the bank, before the bank has even decided to foreclose.
What results is particularly gruesome, if the bank doesn’t decide to foreclose: an abandoned house with no obvious owner. But what I don’t understand is why the homeowners move out in the first place, if they don’t have to and nobody’s asking them to.