America's House Party

(7 of 8)

It can be hard to remember that a house, boom or bust, remains the place where you kick off your shoes at the end of the day. Carol Connelly, 53, and husband Mike, 52, live in a 4,000-sq.-ft. house in the small central Michigan town of Gobles. The Connellys used to live in Chicago, where they sold their Lincoln Park house for $450,000--having paid $208,000--giving them enough money to buy their place in Gobles outright, leave their high-pay, high-pressure jobs and spend more time with their kids, now 14 and 18.

Yet that was in 1996, before the boom. A coldhearted investor could say the Connellys, for all their success, screwed up. Little Gobles is not exactly the white-hot center of the real estate inferno. If they had continued trading up for nine years--buy, fix, sell, buy, fix, sell--there's no telling how much profit they could have made. (Their Chicago house, they say, would now sell for more than $750,000.) And if they had plowed that profit into a second investment property ... and a third ...

But today, ensconced on a forested lot overlooking a private lake and running a free-lance asset-management business from her basement, Carol Connelly has no regrets. "We did things at the right time, and now we have the life we wanted," she says. Besides, she adds, "my kids would kill me if we ever sold this house."

It happens like that sometimes. You make an investment, and along the way, it ends up turning into a home. --Reported by Sonja Steptoe and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Anne Berryman and Amy Bonesteel/Atlanta, Jeanne DeQuine/Miami, Eric Ferkenhoff and Leslie Whitaker/Chicago, Wendy Grossman/ Houston and Barbara Kiviat and Coco Masters/New York

TIME ONLINE EDITION > Visit time.com/realestate for more resources related to this story

BY THE NUMBERS

HOT AND NOT-SO-HOT MARKETS

Where house prices have gone up most

% change over

five years one year

District of Columbia 108.1% 22.2%

California 103.0% 25.4%

Rhode Island 97.6% 17.1%

Nevada 84.7% 31.2%

Hawaii 82.9% 24.4%

Florida 80.5% 21.4%

Maryland 77.9% 21.0%

New Jersey 76.5% 15.8%

New Hampshire 72.3% 12.1%

Massachusetts 71.8% 11.6%

U.S. 50.5% 12.5%

Where prices have lagged