As the mortgage crisis continues to spread, more multi-millionaires are choosing to rent rooms to tenants to make ends meet, according to Alyssa Abkowitz in this Wall Street Journal video. Abkowitz, who was a mansion boarder herself in West Palm Beach, Fla., said that more homeowners associations are beginning to write rental clauses into contracts to accommodate the growing trend. Of course, pesky rules can turn some tenants off of the mansion option: Abkowitz says she wasn’t allowed to have men over to the house and was often asked where she was going when she left home.

As The Real Deal reported this month, wealthy buyers are making waves in the New York City market — and, according to other experts, that trend is spreading across the nation. In this video, Wall Street Journal reporter Candace Jackson explains that activity is up in “the very very top end of the market,” with more developers ready to build multi-million mansions on spec.

From the South Florida Web site: A multimillion-dollar mansion
sale last week brought the extent of the housing crash home to the very
highest end of the South Florida market. Prices, expectations and
declining property values all played a role in the 40 percent discount
reached in the sale of the Palm Beach Island home of William and Sarah
Farish, politically connected prominent Kentucky horse breeders, who
last week accepted $8.38 million for their mansion at the southern end
of the island. Some realtors gulped when they did the math on the sale.
James Orthwein Jr., a trustee of the James B. Orthwein Jr. Revocable
Trust and a scion of the St. Louis Busch family, paid $5.57 million
less than the asking price of $13.95 million. The comments reveal as
much about the alternate reality of the luxury property market as the
sale itself. [more]