by Skip DeKades
November 17, 2028 — Virtual home foreclosures rose 25 percent worldwide in October compared to the prior month, online data firm Cyber-realtyTrac reported this morning.
A total of 200 million digital properties got a default notice, were warned of a pending auction or were foreclosed on.
The Cyber-realtyTrac report is the latest chapter in the ongoing online housing tragedy, which followed a virtual housing bubble that expanded during the early part of the decade. People flocked to virtual home buying in the early part of the decade after credit dried up in the real world, making it impossible to afford a house. But avatars failed to learn from the real-world subprime mortgage crisis of the late 00s, and took out adjustable loans that became unmanageable when virtual home values began to tumble.
Banks and nations in the virtual world Preferred Life are moving to halt defaults as the online economic outlook worsens with rising unemployment and a cataclysmic fall in online home prices.
Kirkazon, the most powerful man in the universe on Preferred Life, held a press conference yesterday in which he called on cyber agencies to help digital families avoid foreclosures and stay in their homes.
“This crisis could force many people to delete their avatars and go back out into the physical world,” he warned. “And that’s something we can’t let happen. We’ll lose our tax base.”
