Bargains: The sunny side of the housing slump

One of those renters was Morganne Teseniar, 26, of Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, who says she wanted to buy a house last fall despite the touch-if-you-dare market.

Teseniar, who works for the American Heart Association, went shopping with a real-estate agent. She found her dream house for $64,000, bid $50,000 on the foreclosed property and moved in this past November.

The previous owner walked away from the house when he got a new job in California, couldn't sell it and wouldn't pay the mortgage, she says. Left behind was a perfectly fine house with redone floors, wrought-iron fixtures and granite countertops.

Morganne Teseniar and her daughter in front of their $50,000 home. © David Woo

"It was gorgeous. I couldn't breathe when I got it. It was so cool," says Teseniar, who is divorced and has a 4-year-old daughter. The price was right, too. She now pays $586 a month for her mortgage, taxes and insurance, $200 less than what she had been paying for rent. And she qualified for a 30-year Federal Housing Administration mortgage to buy it.

Then there are buyers like Lymaris Roman, a Tampa, Fla., pharmacist, and her husband. They saw opportunity, too, in a one-story home with four bedrooms in suburban Lutz, Fla. They bought it for $270,000, far less than its $400,000 appraised value. They moved in on Christmas Day.

Roman's husband, a self-employed contractor, had plenty of time on his hands because of the housing downturn. He spent less than $10,000 upgrading the house, pulling up the carpeting and installing hardwood floors.

They took out an interest-only mortgage and are renting their old house until the market "comes back up."

"Hopefully, the economy will be up and running again. If we can rent it out for longer, great," Roman says.

For the smaller entrepreneur, the deal is the thing.

Alex Szalay, a software writer from Pittsburgh, has redone two houses in the past 18 months. He says it's profitable to buy foreclosed homes that are in reasonably good shape. He bought one house for $72,000 and sold it for $117,000 a few months later in Sharon, Pa., about 30 miles north of Pittsburgh....

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Homebuilders Win Big, Homeowners Wait?

ABC News

Fri Apr 4

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