HOME SELLERS RICH BUT, UH, HOMELESS.

Byline: Kimit Muston Local View

I don't know much about real estate. But I discovered this week that my neighbor, who owned the condo immediately adjacent to mine - with an identical floor plan - sold his unit for $375,000 in just three weeks. He was gone in a cloud of dust and a moving van, leaving behind - beside the trash bin - a couple of cordless phones that don't work and a battery-operated card-shuffling machine. Does everybody have one of those darn things in the closet?

My neighbor is far from alone in this. ``For Sale'' signs are springing up in front lawns along our block like mushrooms. And coming down almost as fast. It's as if the entire city is in migration. To where I'm not sure, and I'm not sure where matters. There's gold in them-there single-family residences, great big nuggets you can pick right up out of the ground. This must have been what it felt like in 1849 - if those get-rich-quick prospectors had crossed the continent in SUVs with cell phones clamped to their ears.

When I open my mailbox, post cards from real-estate agents fall into my hands, with happy, smiling faces on them and not-too-subtle hints that the time to sell is now!

I think I know why they're all smiling in their photos. They get 6 percent per sale, and at the moment they don't seem to be working very hard to make those sales. They have even begun to leave messages on our phone machine, and they all sound out of breath, as if they just came running in from closing another deal, or maybe, just to get into their offices, they had to push through a throng of homeless people shoving preapproved home loans at them.

They're starting to sound a little demanding, too. What's wrong with you? Why are you waiting? Everybody else in Los Angeles is moving out, moving up, and moving on. Why aren't you?

I'm beginning to ask myself the same question. It seems there are vast numbers of people willing to pay enormous sums of money to live where I do. I don't know where they are living now, but they must get out there.

The treasurer of our condo association has put his unit on the block. He's only asking $348,000, but then maybe he's hoping to start a bidding war. That's how my neighbor got the price up on his condo. As they say in the lottery-ad campaigns, ``If you don't play, you can't win.'' Suddenly every homeowner or condo owner or owner of a double-wide mobile home is in play.

All the real-estate agents share a mantra. They repeat the same two words over and over again to buyer and seller, as if these two simple words are magic enough in themselves to drive the market. ``Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan.''

I'm not sure whether those words are a prayer or a curse, and I'm not sure whether the real-estate agents know either. I did a little research. It seems that Greenspan has just been re-appointed by the president to head the Federal Reserve Board for another six-year term. He has some control over interest rates - Greenspan, not the president - and should he have a fight with his wife or eat something that might make him frown in public, interest rates are liable to move upward.

And that would cool the housing market.

Cool it, I am told, but not pop the bubble. There is no housing bubble in Los Angeles, all the real-estate agents I talk to assure me of that. But if this isn't a bubble, then the only way I could describe what is happening is that it's a panic. We are living through a housing panic. Interest rates haven't changed in a year, but they might change soon. And nobody wants to buy the week after the rates go up, even if it's only a quarter of a point. Nope, you've got to buy, and I've got to sell now! We don't want to be left behind holding the bag, even if it's a money bag.

But where are all the neighbors going? Death Valley maybe, where they wander night and day, no longer land-poor but now cash-rich, pockets stuffed with tax-exempt profits from the sale of their homes. Now if they could just afford some place to sleep.

As I said, I don't understand real estate.