Boom buyers quietly smiling

First, let me say this: Of course I have regrets. After all, the purchase of our family home in Hollywood with an adjustable-rate mega-jumbo mortgage closed a mere 119 days before Countrywide Financial Corp. announced that — whoops! — it had, uh, run out of money. Of all the financial horror stories of last summer, this was the one that seemed to mark the official start of what is now commonly referred to as the "credit crunch" — the symptoms of which, if you're an L.A. homeowner at least, include weeping openly in front of CNN real estate bulletins and waking up three or four times during the night to check the tumbling digits next to the satellite image of your home on Zillow.com.

So yeah, I have regrets. Like wishing I had borrowed more money and bought a bigger house.

No, there's no asterisk here, no small print, no catch. And yes, I'm aware that if I tried to sell my house now, I probably would have to pay the buyer and throw in both my kidneys. Yet, as we marked the one-year anniversary of Countrywide's implosion — and by extension the end of the era when a real estate agent could add half a million dollars to an asking price just by installing a stainless steel refrigerator (sorry, I mean "chef's kitchen") — it seems appropriate for me to make a rather bold statement: Those of us who purchased nonspeculative property from 2004 to 2007 for the gratuitously self-indulgent purposes of raising a family and investing in our neighborhoods will ultimately have the last laugh.

OK, maybe not the last laugh — that pleasure is almost certainly reserved for New York hedge fund manager John Paulson, who made a handy 10-digit profit in a matter of months after finding a way to short-sell subprime mortgages.

But if you're a boom-time buyer who can still pay the mortgage (not only do we exist but are in the majority), you have more than you think to feel happy about.

I can tell you're not convinced, so let's do some arithmetic. Say a real estate agent with a particularly reassuring grin talked you into buying a home in a decent neighborhood for $1.2 million in 2005, using $200,000 of your own cash and a million-dollar mortgage given to you by some dude you found on Craigslist. This is the higher end of the market, to be sure, but not out of the ordinary during the mortgage mania of the go-go Greenspan years. Now let's pessimistically assume that the credit crunch has destroyed a third of your home's value, so it's now worth $800,000.