Las Vegas mortgage defaults increasingly strategic - mortgage walkaways rise among wealthy

The real estate market has been cruel, to be perfectly honest, to homeowners across the country. Housing values in many cities and regions have dropped so far and fast that it's sometimes hard to keep track of it all. Much less understand how the utter devastation is possible. But that is the cold reality every homeowner is faced with today.

Southern Nevada - with communities like Las Vegas, Summerlin, Henderson, Southern Highlands, Anthem, Green Valley and Mountains Edge - has absorbed some of the most severe blows of them all to its real estate prices. In the same boat are at least Arizona, California and Florida. Industry observers are talking about values often dipping below replacement cost. With that type of erosion comes another grim problem; dragging scores of mortgage borrowers underwater on their homes.

Many Las Vegas homeowners are increasingly thinking of walking away from the obligation. The more they are upside down, or underwater, the more likely it is that they'll do just that. It's hard to consider moral responsibility that much any more when in-the-red numbers are typed in six figures.

What's noteworthy is that the well-off are now more liable to execute a strategic walkaway from a mortgage than others. Experian, the credit firm, and Oliver Wyman, a management consulting shop, have conducted a study on this and it proves the intriguing trend. The reasons of course are many, although the availability of money is not one of them.

Perhaps some of these mortgage borrowers feel that Wall Street operators are largely responsible for the real estate fiasco and their own current troubles and this is payback time. Wall Street banks and investment firms created the subprime home loan products, packaged a multitude of loans into complicated mortgage-backed securities for sale to investors and colluded with bond rating agencies to hype the bonds' potential. Many of them are now surviving on taxpayer largesse, but are still reluctant to help homeowners in distress.

Also, these people probably have the confidence in their ability to recover in a reasonable time frame from any damage to their credit. They often have a decent knowledge base of how credit works. They are fairly secure in their employment even in this down economy and in case a job loss is inevitable have predictably put away a sizable safety fund to draw from for months.

That well-to-do homeowners are more apt to pull off a strategic mortgage default is in some ways unsurprising. In pure monetary terms they usually are underwater the most, like when a $1.2 mil mini mansion in Las Vegas loses 50% of its value, that's $600Ks. That's a bundle.