Ready for the next real estate crisis?

It’s been hard to keep track of all the real estate crises lately. There was the subprime-mortgage debacle. There’s the ever-increasing number of housing foreclosures. There are the countless homeowners who haven’t been able to sell their homes.

The crises keep coming.

But, according to Prashant Gopal, a writer for BusinessWeek, the next big real estate crisis will hit the country in April of next year. That’s when hundreds of thousands of adjustable-rate mortgages are scheduled to reset to higher interest rates, and, of course, higher monthly mortgage payments. Expect this to bring on a new round of foreclosure activity.

You can read this gloomy story here.

Many homeowners took out adjustable-rate mortgages to take advantage of an artificially low initial interest rate. They then figured they’d be able to sell their houses for healthy profits before the loan reset to a higher monthly payment.

Problem is, with the housing slump, these homeowners are now stuck with homes they can’t sell. When their loans adjust, there are going to be many who can’t afford their new monthly mortgage payments.

So, if you are tired of all the bad housing news hitting the country, you might not want to read the newspapers too carefully the next few years.