Boom Towns

Word on the street is that May was a pretty bad month for homeowners. The real estate analysis company RealtyTrac reported that more than 73,000 homes were lost in the U.S. due to bank foreclosure or repossession.

This is an incredibly unfortunate situation for people who may have been tied up with sub-prime loans. However, if you're new to the market or were hibernating during the past few years, this foreclosure boom—as some analysts are calling it—could be your chance to get a very nice piece of property.

“It's definitely a different kind of market than what we got used to a couple years ago,” Devin Reiss, owner of Realty 500 Reiss Corp. in Las Vegas told Bloomberg News. “We used to sell homes in a day. Now 50% of our sales are foreclosures.”

A house that might have needed financial acrobatics to afford a few years ago may now be within reach. [Bloomberg News]