15K primary residence tax credit in stimulus bill

Hopefully Kurt won't get too mad that I've cross posted on this in politics, but after reading the amendment, I thought this might be an interesting real-estate discussion.

This tax credit actually looks pretty neat for anyone thinking of buying a home. The purchase has to be a principal residence you move in to within two years of the purchase. The deduction is equal to a maximum of 15,000.00 or 10% of the value, whichever is larger, and can be applied over two years after the purchase. You also have to buy the home within one year after the 2009 stimulus bill passes, so it's very temporary.

I can see a few loop holes in this. You could use this to buy a second home as long as you were willing to live there for a period of time that fell within the definition of a principal residence. I'm not too sure how long that is, maybe it's the two years out of five the IRS currently uses. The amazing thing about it seems to be that it's a deduction of your federal tax, so I guess if you bought a house for 150K, and had 15K in taxes, your net tax bill for the year would be zero.

I'm guessing there are going to be some people taking advantage of this. 15K is a lot of money.

Here's the amendment that was passed -

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/promos/politics/blog/04blog-isakson-amendment.pdf