Isn't it ironic dontcha think?: Bank of America Stuck With Real-Estate Chief's Unsold House

[marmar]

Bank of America Stuck With Real-Estate Chief’s Unsold House
By David Mildenberg


March 20 (Bloomberg) -- Barbara Desoer, who runs the largest U.S. housing lender, can speak from experience about tumbling property prices: She couldn’t sell her own home.

Desoer, 56, put her 4,500-square-foot house in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the market Aug. 1 for $1.675 million. She had just been named head of Bank of America Corp.’s real-estate unit, Countrywide Financial Corp., in Calabasas, California.

The home, which she and her husband bought in 2000 for $1.15 million, sold in December for a price that wasn’t made public. The buyer: Bank of America, according to a proxy the lender filed March 18. Now the house is for sale again, at $1.295 million, $380,000 less than the original asking price, according to listing agent Allen Tate Realtors.

“The scary thing is the amount of inventory we have right now,” said Ed Baesel, a Charlotte real-estate broker with Cottingham Chalk Bissell Hayes. At the current pace of sales of $1 million-plus homes in Charlotte’s most expensive neighborhoods, it would take more than six years to sell the homes on the market, he said.

Million-dollar homes are finding few buyers as increasing job losses, slumping stock prices and declining property values cut demand for new and existing U.S. homes. Home prices fell 12.4 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, the most ever for an index compiled by the National Association of Realtors. In the Charlotte area, home to Bank of America, home sales have posted double-digit percentage declines every month since June 2007, according to the Carolina Multiple Listing Services. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a6WwnMO8EfAQ&refer=home