IF YOU’RE wondering why I’m sweating so much, the answer is simple: I’m waiting for The End. It’s been a long time coming, there’s no doubt about it. But I still feel unprepared. During my 31 years, I’ve lived through a few traumatic events: the dot-com crash, September 11, anthrax, the Iraq war, Simon Cowell’s America’s Got Talent.

And yet this new Armageddon fills me with equal dread. Yes, the explosive charge in the foundations of America’s housing boom has been detonated. The wrecking ball has swung. After 17 consecutive interest-rate rises by the Federal Reserve, sales of existing homes in California have suffered their biggest fall in nearly 25 years, while the median home price across the entire country has recorded its first decline in a decade.

It’s all over. Let the demolition begin.

Just a few months ago, “open houses” in LA were like orgies. Real estate brokers would lay out tables of finger-food, while throngs of potential buyers would swoon over the stainless steel bathroom fixtures, fantasise about the remodelling potential (we can fit a hot tub in the back!) and, most importantly, jostle to outbid each other.

These days the ahi tuna canapés are gone, the brokers look ill and the only buyers are professional vultures, offering 30 per cent below listing. As for the sellers, they can be found upstairs in bed, hyperventilating.

The worst affected are the “flippers”: people who bought multiple properties in the hope of reselling them quickly. Now they’re left with more homes than Bono and no money for groceries.

If you believe some of the more hysterical commentators, all this will drag the entire American economy into recession by next year (there are almost as many “bubble blogs” as there are political blogs, with the difference being that the bubble blogs are all in agreement). The pessimists have a point: housing is a psychological thing. When prices go down, consumers feel poorer even though, to some extent, everyone benefits from cheaper real estate. To make matters worse, the rising interest rates are a result of inflation, which also makes people feel poorer.

As you might have guessed, I’m not objective here: I bought an overpriced house in an overpriced area at perhaps the most overpriced point in the entire decade-long trend of overpricing. Not only that, but I also made the purchase with the kind of dodgy mortgage that allows you to pay less than the actual rate of interest (which adjusts every month).

The bank kindly adds the underpaid interest on to the principal, which therefore goes steadily up instead of down. This is known as “negative amortisation” — a phrase I remember hearing a lot on the TV in the late Eighties. By Christmas I will be filing this column from an empty plasma TV box on Skid Row and collecting my lawsuits from a post office box.

It’s tempting to blame the real-estate brokers, who helped to convince everyone that because house prices had survived the dot-com bust, September 11 and Iraq, they could survive an oil-inflation crisis also.

The lives of these narcissistic über-salespeople are documented in the latest reality TV show, Million Dollar Listing, which follows a handful of them around LA as they make outrageous 3 per cent commissions on $5 million homes (that’s $150,000 for one sale, or $300,000 if they represent both seller and buyer).

One of these brokers, Madison Hildebrand, 25, has even started to issue press releases to get press for the press he already got on the show. His latest announcement reads: “Being dubbed by the press as ‘the model agent with the bright white smile’, Hildebrand seems to have the charisma and looks that are synonymous with success in the real estate industry.” Honestly.

Even more annoying than the brokers, however, are the so-called “Bubble Sitters” — people who sold their homes at the highest precipice of the boom-graph, then rented in the hope of buying back their old property at a fraction of the price.

The only consolation to us homeowners is this: America’s tax system favours mortgage-holders, and Southern California’s last bubble took six awful years of 5 per cent price declines to burst fully. That’s a long time to live in a rented home, especially a town as obsessed with status as LA. I hope the Bubble Sitters loathe every second of it.

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