Housing Woes Hit Affluent Middle-Class Homeowners

When Brandt and Tiffany Schneider put their brick colonial on the market for $1.2 million last April, they had every reason to be optimistic.

The home, three years old and in a suburban neighborhood here, features a two-story great room with a stone fireplace and a leafy backyard. The couple’s agent told them she would be shocked if it didn’t sell within 30 days.

After all, the Schneiders had owned five previous homes over the past decade, all of which had sold in the first month for more than the couple had paid. A year later, they are renting a house in Madison, Wis., where they moved to be closer to family, and are still waiting for a buyer for their old home.

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Despite Mr. Schneider’s new job as a manager at a logistics company, his family has had to cut expenses and eliminate vacations in order to cover the $2,500-a-month rent in Madison and the mortgage payments, taxes and utility bills still due in Greensboro.

Half a dozen price cuts haven’t done much to generate more traffic — two months recently passed between showings — and the Schneiders are now asking $874,900. At that price, they would just about recoup what they originally spent buying and upgrading the house.

"We’re hanging on by the skin of our teeth," says Mrs. Schneider, 41, a stay-at-home mom with three children. At one point, the family held a garage sale to raise some extra money. "We put a lot of cash down, we didn’t take out a subprime loan. But we never thought we’d have a hard time selling a great home in a wonderful neighborhood."

Nearly a year after the mortgage meltdown became front-page news, the Schneiders’ travails reflect how the nation’s housing woes have moved beyond subprime borrowers in working-class neighborhoods and into the realm of upper-middle-class homeowners.

Last week, a new report showed that house prices nationwide were off 14.1 percent from a year ago, while the Commerce Department said sales of new homes remained near their lowest levels since 1991.

THE market here isn’t like those of Florida or California, which have followed a boom-and-bust pattern, or of Cleveland, where foreclosures have overwhelmed entire neighborhoods.

Instead, what’s playing out here is a kind of paralysis, with wide swaths of the market frozen and only the very top end showing signs of life.

This may hint at what’s in store for other real estate markets around the nation that managed to avoid the excesses of the last decade but still find themselves struggling now.

Indeed, the recent economic trajectory of Greensboro, a city of 242,000 smack in the middle of the rolling Carolina Piedmont, has run parallel to that of the country as a whole.

Sales of existing homes here are down 22.5 percent from the first quarter of 2007, according to G. Donald Jud, a University of North Carolina economist who tracks the market for local Realtors, compared with a 21.7 percent drop in home sales nationally.

Unemployment in the Greensboro area averaged 5.1 percent in April, versus 5 percent nationwide. The mortgage delinquency rate of 4.04 percent, meanwhile, is nearly identical to the country’s rate, 4.35 percent.

"In some ways, Greensboro got caught up in the national housing boom," Mr. Jud says. "It was neither a bubble nor a bust, but people in the middle are now feeling the pinch from rising costs and getting overextended."

Greensboro has fared better than other places in terms of foreclosures, though they were up 23 percent in April, versus the same month a year earlier; nationally, the jump was roughly 65 percent.

"But that’s still pretty high for us," Mr. Jud says. "The market is still weakening, inventories are growing and sales prices are dropping." Across the nation, foreclosures are expected to keep rising, flooding the market with more homes.

In Greensboro at the end of the first quarter, nearly 2,500 homes were on the market, up nearly 12 percent from December. And it’s midprice residences that have been hardest hit.

While sales of properties valued at less than $150,000 are down 13.3 percent from a year ago, sales of homes between $150,000 and $350,000 are off more than 27 percent.

The one exception to this otherwise sobering picture is Irving Park, a gracious neighborhood where some of Greensboro’s original tobacco and textile heirs still reside. Like other wealthy enclaves such as Menlo Park, Calif., Irving Park has escaped much of the downdraft affecting outlying suburbs like Summerfield, where the Schneiders’ home is for sale.

But over drinks in the wood-paneled dining room of the Greensboro Country Club, there are whispers that even Irving Park may be susceptible to the downturn. More properties are selling at substantial discounts, at least one member’s million-dollar home is in foreclosure, and a prominent local bankruptcy lawyer says he is seeing a new kind of client.

As recently as two years ago, says the lawyer, Charles M. Ivey III, "I felt like I was a veterinarian for dinosaurs — clients were disappearing." Now, he’s seeing more and more of what he calls "paper millionaires," real estate investors who thought that the good times would go on forever.

"Mostly they bought a slew of properties, hoping to flip them and with refinancing, they thought they could stretch it out," Mr. Ivey says. "Hopefully, we can buy enough time to sell off their properties."