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Alfred Lord Tennyson thought spring was for love, but it’s appears to be different this year. To be sure, spring is a time for change. After being cooped up for the winter (yes, even in California), we emerge into the sunlight, ready to absorb its healthy Vitamin D. Polls show that spring traditionally brings better moods and positive expectations for most of the population.

Certainly, for many years this elation has been channeled into real estate-related activities. In all my years in the business, I’ve seen activity pick up around mid-February and continue through April. Sellers list property, prospects start looking for property. Even the activity around home improvement increases, whether in anticipation of selling or just because the weather’s better. Maybe it’s the culmination of projects you notice must get done when you’re stuck inside.

Of course, people focus on real estate in the spring because they want to make moves before summer vacation, and they want to make sure deals are finalized before the kids go back to school.

This year, however, there seems to be even more of a hubbub in real estate as spring begins. I’m seeing lots of reasons for this.

Low interest rates. Last week the Federal Reserve voted to keep interest rates at their historically low rates. This is giving people incentive to think about entering or investing in the real estate market again.

Number of properties available. No secret here. With lots of foreclosures and short sales out there, the market has never been better.

Number of sources for properties. More than ever before, properties are available both through traditional real-estate transactions and non-traditional seller-to-buyer transactions. Going the latter route requires a trusted advisor, but the traditional 6% commission structure is under fire as never before.

This silver lining has a cloud, of course — one that we’ve talked about before. The delays involved in appraisals, financing, and mortgage approvals are worse than they’ve ever been, stretching out to months instead of weeks. Even people whose credit histories are stellar and who have equity in their homes are seeing delays in simple refinancing deals. If you really want to either buy or invest in property — no matter what the source — before summer vacation or the autumn school year, the time to start your efforts is now.

Earlier this month, I wrote about the challenges of obtaining what’s known as an abstract of title for a property in Des Moines. It’s a legal document unique to Iowa that requires the services not of a title company, but of a real estate lawyer. If you never owned real estate in Iowa, you’d never know such a document existed.

But now that DBNR is investing in real estate across the country, I’m beginning to realize that not only are there many arcane, regionally specific rules, but also that municipalities are grasping on out-of-town investors as a faceless source of income. Some of our properties have been abandoned, which means that no one is there to see legal notices posted on the door regarding issues such as weed abatement. When the city receives no response to an order, penalties, fines and interest begin to mount up. Out-of-towners, after all, can’t vote, and so are frequently powerless to effectively argue liens and other orders.

We have one property on Logan Street in Minneapolis. It’s a stately, 4BR/2BA two-story house on a good size lot. We’ve gotten more call volume on this property than any other. But even before we obtained it, because of its deteriorated condition, the city had imposed a tear-down order.

We talked to city officials, who told us we had two options: raze it or bring it up to code, at a cost the city estimated: $80,000. If the city razes it, it’ll send us the bill. Interestingly, when we talked to contractors in Minneapolis about this situation, we learned that if you have a local person who knows how to deal with the city, the costs come down considerably. It just requires someone local who knows how to deal in person with the system. One contractor told me, “We do this a lot because there are lots of old properties in the city that have been abandoned. It’s a fairly generic process.”

As it happens, the bank that foreclosed on the property had filed an injunction against the tear-down order, so we have some buffer in terms of figuring out how to deal with this.

We face a similar, but more optimistic situation, with a house on Bonar Street in Indianapolis. This house is in pretty bad shape, and it has $36,000 in back taxes and fines on it to boot (the city had done weed abatement on it, and assessed a fee for doing so). We found a buyer for the house, someone who knew and loved the area because she’d lived there as a child. We told her about the back taxes, warning her that she’d have to deal with the city about them. We don’t know the end of the story, but she thinks she can get the figure whittled down to around $7,000. Why? Because she’s going to be a tax-paying, voting citizen there.

Nobody likes foreclosed homes, and to be fair, municipalities are dealing with severe financial issues because of the loss of property tax revenue from abandoned properties. But it seems like they’re using this opportunity to soak absentee landlords for fees they can’t get from locals. Large out-of-state banks may be bureaucratic molasses to the rest of us, but to municipalities, they’re a godsend. Their slow-moving characteristics mean that fines and penalties can pile up quickly without someone paying attention to them, and corporations are more likely to pay the fines and write them off. The problem is that small companies like DBNR are being caught up in these nets too.

Want to know the current state of home ownership? Consider this February 2010 report from a real estate analytics firm, a division of First American Insurance:

First American CoreLogic reported today that more than 11.3 million, or 24 percent, of all residential properties with mortgages, were in negative equity at the end of the fourth quarter of 2009, up from 10.7 million and 23 percent at the end of the third quarter of 2009. An additional 2.3 million mortgages were approaching negative equity at the end of last year, meaning they had less than five percent equity. Together, negative equity and near?negative equity mortgages accounted for nearly 29 percent of all residential properties with a mortgage nationwide.

That’s a lot of people with negative equity or, to use the colloquialism, whose mortgages are “upside-down” or “underwater.” What happens when you owe more on something than it’s worth? Your pride of ownership is diminished, certainly. And we’re really only talking about two things where this applies: houses and cars. We can buy stock and have it lose value, but stocks have more liquidity, so we can sell them quickly. We expect cars to depreciate, so that’s no big deal (if you feel that way, lease them).

But homes — that’s a different story. We expect homes to appreciate, whether they’re our primary residence or an investment. So what happens when almost a third of mortgaged properties stop meeting their owners’ expectations? The First American CoreLogic report cites an interesting observation: when negative equity reaches 25% or $70,000, people begin to behave not like homeowners but like investors who don’t want to pay for a declining asset any longer. They stop making payments and walk away.

That’s a lot of people potentially giving up on the American Dream of a safe harbor, a place to raise a family, a place tightly woven into the concept of controlling one’s own destiny. If you own your home, you can’t be evicted, and your lives and those of your children disrupted. Your rent can’t be raised exorbitantly. You get a mortgage deduction (this year, anyway). You get equity (usually) over the long term.

That’s really the key phrase: over the long term. People who walk away from a mortgage clearly have no appreciation of the long term. Not only do they not believe in it relating to the value of their property, but they also ignore the long-term ramifications of their actions on other facets of their life.

They forfeit their down payment and any other payments they’ve made. They forfeit any opportunity to see the value rise. But there’s more. You want underwater? Walking away from a payment commitment is like drowning your credit rating for seven to ten years. Your credit rating isn’t just something people look at when you want to buy another house when the economy turns around in the future; it’s something they look at when you buy a car, an appliance, apply for a credit card, or even rent an apartment.

There’s more: with the easy accessibility of credit reports, employers are using them more frequently to make hiring decisions. It doesn’t even matter if you’re going to be handling money; employers look at credit ratings and payment histories as a reflection of trustworthiness and stability.

In a country nurtured on instant gratification, patience is not a virtue highly valued. But in this scenario, people must begin to value it, at the risk of devaluing — no, crippling — their future opportunities.

A California-born colleague of mine tells the story of being completely befuddled in a North Carolina ice cream parlor many years ago. The girl behind the counter was asking him a simple question. But because of both her thick accent and the words she was using, it took him a while to realize she was asking, “One dip or two?” A “dip” to her was a “scoop” to him.

I had the same reaction this week dealing with a Realtor in Des Moines, Iowa, where DBNR has a distressed property on 11^th St. that we’re selling. The Realtor is representing us on the 5BR, 1BA (believe it or not) 1,400-square-foot gabled house with porch and basement. It was a bank foreclosure that was transferred first to the middlemen from whom we purchased our cluster of distressed properties and then to DBNR.

We’ve gone through several rounds of negotiations around commission and closing costs because the price is so low, and I thought those would be the most of our aggravations on this property. I was wrong. In a phone conversation last week, the Realtor asked me where the abstract to the house was. That was my “one dip or two” moment, because I had no idea what an abstract was.

I’ve learned working with distressed properties across the U.S. that I’ve grown remarkably comfortable in the bubble of local Silicon Valley real estate. Whatever vagaries we have to deal with out there, I’ve long since grown used to them. I’d forgotten that lots of other places of vagaries too. In Iowa, it’s the concept of an “abstract of title.”

Apparently, a long time ago, the lawyers in Iowa pushed through legislation that forbid the use of title insurance, substituting a regulation in which real-estate lawyers draw up abstracts confirming the transfer of ownership. Whenever the title to a house is transferred, another page is added to the abstract, which is a physical sheaf of papers that stays with the house and is handed from owner to owner. The older the house, the thicker the stack of papers. It’s up to the homeowner to figure out whether to keep them in a binder, or a manila folder, or a box. Technically, if you don’t have the abstract, you can’t own the house.

But as you know, the bank foreclosed on the owners. This wasn’t a friendly transaction where one happy home seller handed off the keys to the house to another happy home buyer with their real estate agents beaming in the background, a scene where the abstract would presumably handed off as well. And DBNR was three owners later. Where was the abstract, indeed?

As it turns out, we did a little research and discovered that just because the state doesn’t have title insurance doesn’t mean it doesn’t have title companies. It’s not so antediluvian that the state doesn’t require copies of the abstract to be filed with the state. A title search — though expensive — can be done and a copy of the abstract ordered. (And yes, we would have expected a Realtor in Iowa to know that.)

But for a while there, we were wondering how we were going to lay our hands on this obscure document that could have been anywhere between here and Des Moines. Life is very educational when you get a glimpse of what’s going on outside your bubble.