As Paul points out the general consesus in the stock market and other economic communities is that any "bursting" of the housing bubble is going to be localized events. It's very unlikely that all of the sudden all real estate in the U.S. is going to lose value dramatically. That would only happen if the U.S. suddenly became a very undesirable place to live compared to the rest of the world. What may happen though is that real estate buyers will become less common as interest rates go back up, this will cause some loss in real estate prices but it's not likely to be dramatic enough to causes houses to lose $100,000 in value.