FYI all, Today's Wall Street Journal[19 May], front page section C1 discusses Gulf Coast condo speculators using secured or unsecured letters of credit to tie up condo units pre-construction instead of deposit/ down payment money. Now you can pay 1 to 3 percent of your deposit/down payment annually and control multiple condos pre-construction. Only thing interesting about this historically is that, the last time this practise was widely used [along with interest-only loans] was in the 1920s before the Depression.