Well, we just tried the case we called "The Weed That Ate Corona.: There is a weed called scale broom - people would be sitting watching television and notice a bulge in the carpet and they would cut the carpeting off and the weed would come out. It would literally destroy and rip the homes apart.

Oh, yes. You should've been here the day the lady came in and explained her problem. I said, "Holy cow!" I though I was going to fall off this chair. This weed would literally come up from underneath the ground and lift swimming pools loaded full of water right out of the ground. People were abandoning their homes. It was an incredible case.

There were about 22 homes affected by this. (The weed is) prevalent in wash areas. Very few experts are familiar with it; it lays dormant for hundreds of years. It grows in a catacomb fashion underneath the earth and when water hits it, it comes to the surface no matter what is above it. It would rip the corner of homes apart.

That's the problem with it. The bottom line of it is not so much who did what, but who was best prepared to share the burden? The little post office clerk and his wife put their entire proceeds of the sale of their prior home into the one in Corona and now they were within three years of retirement and they were going to lose everything because the home literally plummeted to zero value. So our point was to go in and force the developer to correct this wrong, which we ultimately did.

I think that home prices have bottomed out. We'll bounce along this year to where we'll turn around at the start of early next year. By '95 we should be in full swing again.