Stop, thief!

This is a new feature I'm trying out: The "Made out like a bandit" award. These will be given out to homeowners who purchased a property within the past six years (the U.S. housing bubble is considered to begin in 2001 on wikipedia.org) and were recently able to reload their properties to a GF (greater fool) for a large profit.

This will be shown by the following graphic:
Now, on to the fun:
28431 Brandon Drive is a 23-year-old, three-bedroom house in a nice part of Laguna Niguel, Calif. (what part of this city isn't nice). It's located in a gated area close to Rancho Niguel Park. This 2,288 square-foot place went for $420,000 in 2000, according to Zillow, and then again for $599,000 in August of 2002.

The latest sale, in August, 2006, was for a whopping $1.05 million!

Assuming no monkey business with HELOCs and other funky credit, the homeowners who got out last summer pocketed about $388,000 for their four years of residence (assuming 6 percent selling costs).

In case you're not sick to your stomach yet (and you probably should be), the house netted these folks $97,000 in profit per year. All they had to do was live there. Talk about golden eggs.

Here's a Microsoft Virtual Earth shot of the neighborhood: