With all the recent slowdown in the real estate market and increase in foreclosures – I’d heard some people mention to keep an eye out for fires.  I’d discounted this idea – naively…until Friday night.  There’s a house on my street that went into foreclosure and is now bank owned.  It’s totally vacant, so it was a suprise to me when it was completely ablaze this past Friday at midnight.  It was a bit suspicious knowing that it was vacant, but it could have been anything – bad wiring, new electric service, etc.  There were fire inspectors there on Saturday and Sunday… so it was an even bigger suprise to see that on Sunday evening at 8pm… it was REALLY on fire – AGAIN.  It seems that somebody really wanted that place to burn down.  And it worked… despite the dilligent efforts of just about all of our local firefighters, the place completely burned for hours.  Now, I’m not a fire inspector or police officer, but it seems that the only people that it would benefit if the house burned down would be the bank that owned it.  Does this mean that banks hire arsonists in order to collect insurance money???  Your guess is as good as mine because I don’t know the situation with insurance, ownership, etc…. but I can only hope that this singular event does not start a trend.