At the foreclosure auction at Miami-Dade Court

In the run-up to the US election, FRANCE 24 reporters visit battleground states to take the temperature of people living through unprecedented economic and political times. Their first stop, Florida, has suffered hugely from the subprime disaster.

When you're from an oft rain swept town in England, it is hard to equate sunshine with misery.

 

But that's the mood among homeowners and many property investors in Miami and much of the Sunshine State right now.

 

Florida has dipped in and of the second spot for the highest number of foreclosed homes in the USA over the past year or so.

 

It's not immediately obvious. Driving out of the airport, I'm struck by just how many new skyscrapers are dotting the its sprawling skyline, with cranes hanging off them.

 

As we move into the Downtown area, it seems every vacant bit of land is surrounded by billboards and hoardings advertising the next pile of luxury condominiums.

 

It all looks promising. Then we arrive at the foreclosure auction at Miami-Dade Court.

 

When Miami's property market exploded along with the rest of the US, you could barely get into the room - and several potential buyers we interview tell us this immediately.

 

Today there are less than a hundred or so people and hardly anyone is buying.

 

The auctioneer goes through the motions of offering up many apartments and coastal homes, but it's usually the bank that ends up buying them back.

 

They want to wait and see if the economic rescue package, designed to suck up bad debts, might be a better option. 

 

Of course during the boom years, foreclosures and repossessions happened all the time and this auction was a good place to find a home.

 

But the financial crash means credit has dried up; banks simply haven't got the money to lend.

 

The only people buying now are those with a little pot of gold, either pensioners or those who already have sizeable portfolios they can draw on.

 

One couple get a three-bed foreclosed home for 132,000 dollars. In 2006 it was worth 439,000 dollars in what they used to call a "good sale". The words look like a cruel joke here.

 

It's a steal that has many buyers shaking their heads, not just in surprise, but at the parlous state of the market.

 

Still, some investors think the worst has passed.

 

Frank Silver, who buys a two bedroom condominium for 50,000 (70,000 in 2002) talks about a correction in which most homes have lost about 20 per cent of their value. That's around the level for homes in some parts of the UK.

 

"It'll recover as soon as banks start lending again, it has to," Frank says.

 

It's a rare note of optimism and the kind of sentiment Washington's bailout plan was designed for.

 

But it's likely to be years before ordinary homeowners who risk losing the roof over their heads feel the same way.