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...real estate mistakes on the Strip were made in miniature by thousands of Vegas homeowners. To see the real devastation, I have to leave the line of casinos along the Strip and drive to where people in Las Vegas actually live. I head out to spend the day with real estate agent Brooke Boemio, a bouncy, sweet, recently remarried 31-year-old mom whom I met years ago when I was on another assignment. Boemio is doing great during this recession. In fact, she's never had a job that paid as well: she made more than $100,000 last...
...Las Vegas Boulevard...
...privately financed development ever in the U.S. Although the company has managed to keep the project going through a desperate battle for financing deals with Dubai World, a number of people who signed up for condominiums are looking to bail. So MGM Mirage, which owns the most properties on Las Vegas Boulevard - the Strip - ducked and weaved around bankruptcy for six months earlier this year by pumping $140 million, almost a quarter of its monthly revenues, into the project. MGM sold off Treasure Island at a bargain price: Phil Ruffin, the buyer, paid the equivalent of $225,000 for each...
Boemio specializes in short selling, in a particularly Vegas way. Basically, she finds clients who owe more on their house than the house is worth (and that's about 60% of homeowners in Las Vegas) and sells them a new house similar to the one they've been living in at half the price they paid for their old house. Then she tells them to stop paying the mortgage on their old place until the bank becomes so fed up that it's willing to let the owner sell the house at a huge loss rather than dragging everyone through...
...entire city of John Dillingers, feeling guiltless for stealing from the banks. Boemio is well aware that short selling isn't ethical and is exacerbating Vegas' economic problems. People, she believes, should make their payments, accept their paper losses and ride out the crash. "Guess what, a______s of Las Vegas. That's what gambling is about. That's what investing is about," she says. "It's greedy. But we're all doing it. Because why not?" It's very hard, she says, to suffer as the one honest person in a town of successful con artists...