Speculators May Have Accelerated Housing Downturn

``Roughly 20% of mortgage fraud involved "occupancy fraud," or borrowers falsely claiming they intended to live in a property, according to an analysis by BasePoint Analytics...'' -- Jibes with what we've seen. Of course this happened even without fraud; we know speculation was huge e.g. in Florida, where large percentages of people are opting to pay the cancellation penalties on condos and other property.