House for sale -- cheap

It's 88 degrees in St. Petersburg today. Good thing me and my stuff are in air conditioning.
Now, if I can just get us in the same air-conditioned space.
As I sit in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment in my beach chair, I dream about the comfy couch across town in a storage facility.
But the end is coming soon!
We bought a house -- a foreclosed house -- from the bank.
The real estate market in southwestern Florida is as bad or even worse than the one I left in Lorain, Ohio.
There are so many houses for sale and most of them are in at least PRE-foreclosure, which seems to mean nothing more than the step before full-blown foreclosure.
We had to look for a second house after the first one we "bought" did not appraise as high as the price we had agreed to pay. The buyers wouldn't budge so we walked away from the deal.
As it turns out -- GOOD THING!
I ended up finding a crackerjack ball-of-fire real estate agent named Delia and she had a house up her sleeve.
It's brand new and twice as big as the first one and has marble and tile throughout -- and we got it for almost exactly half of the price it was when it was foreclosed on two years ago. Since then it has been sold at auction, another deal that fell through. We are the third buyers of this new house. It must have been like gum on the bottom of the shoe of the bank that owned it for it to be offered at such a great price.
We should be in by the end of the month.
It doesn't have a pool -- a deal breaker for my husband -- but with the money we saved buying it, we can afford to put one in -- immediately.
The woman who foreclosed on this house, located in the Gulfport area of St. Pete, was from California. She had it built -- with all the upgrades -- but for some reason never moved in or, obviously, paid for it.
Buyers are lucky in this market but poor sellers certainly aren't.
What's going to happen to all these houses that are worth so much less than the owners paid for them? I don't know but I hope somebody smart figures it out soon -- hopefully someone smart enough not to ask "hockey moms" what the bailout plan should be.