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Here in Arizona, no one is sneaking in to strip the houses. It's the foreclosed former homeowners doing it. The thought behind it is, "I've been paying for this place for 5 years. I've loved and taken care of this place. I've installed ceiling fans, shutters, tile, carpet, upgraded fixtures, appliances, landscaping, cabinets, epoxy in the garage, etc. etc. etc. I'm not walking away from that." So they remove whatever they can to either keep or sell. Can't blame them... especially the way everyone has been treated by banks which were given stimulus money to spend to pay down principle and instead bought bonds with it.

I live in a condo community and the prices have fallen through the floor. They cannot sell these places because they'll only consider you if you walk in with cash. I'm seeing a movement afoot amongst my neighbors now... people are buying the place three units over and walking away from their own. It's happening more and more often. But you do have to have 100% cash. So people are cashing out IRAs, one of my neighbors cashed in a life insurance policy. The prices are getting so low that it's becoming feasible.

Here in Arizona, no one is sneaking in to strip the houses. It's the foreclosed former homeowners doing it

I'm sure there is a lot of that going on here too. In the case of the houses I was thinking of they had never been occupied. A developer had put up a dozen or so $1,000,000 plus houses and then went broke. They ranged from complete and ready for occupancy to just framed in shells. They couldn't sell the complete ones because nobody wanted to move into a million dollar home next to a half build shell with no possible completion date. Also if there was anything wrong with the house there was nobody to contact since the builder was gone. So they just sat empty and then it was discovered that most had been completely looted and scavenged. The paper said they would probably need to be taken down to the foundations since it was hard to tell how much damage had been done.