This story highlights incidents in real estate markets around the country. But I thought that an increase in arson-for-mortgages odd and fascinating enough to pass on.

One piece particularly caught my attention, having covered the recovery of a family who lost their home to the fall wildfires of 2003. This L.A Times piece says that investigators are looking into the possibility that some of the 2,000 homes destroyed in last fall’s fires were instead burned by owners trying to get out of paying their mortgage.

Here’s the full LAT story:

Some folks celebrate their last home mortgage payment by setting fire to their loan agreement. Lately, people behind on their mortgages are simply setting fire to their homes.

In what appears to the latest symptom of the U.S. mortgage meltdown and credit crisis, insurers, law enforcement and state agencies nationwide have reported a jump in home and automobile fires in the past year set by owners unable to pay their debts. The numbers are small, but they’re leading the insurance industry to scrutinize more closely what seem to be routine blazes.

“We’ve seen a dramatic increase in this kind of fraud,” said Dan Bales, director of fraud investigations at Mercury Insurance. “People upside down on their house with variable interest-rate loans, or upside down on their cars, are pretty quick to burn their property right now.”

Last week, a Sacramento, Calif.-area couple was arrested on charges that they burned their Jeep and drove their Nissan pickup into a river, then filed fraudulent insurance claims. According to investigators, the wife admitted she was trying to escape her $600 monthly car payment.

Three weeks ago, police arrested a woman in Easley, S.C., and accused her of deliberately setting fire to her home just three days after the bank hung a foreclosure notice on her door. In January, an Omaha, Neb., man was charged with arranging to have his three-bedroom house burned down to avoid losing it to the bank.

The fires are keeping fraud investigators such as Anne Luce occupied. “I’m busier now than a one-armed paper hanger,” said Luce, who works on auto cases for Bristol West Insurance’s special-investigations unit. “What is happening is terrifically economically driven.”

These financially motivated fires are surprising some officials, because they come after a decadelong decline in overall arson rates nationwide. Few state or federal agencies categorize arson in terms of the financial status of liens on the property, making nationwide figures elusive. Still, areas of the country are showing a significant increase.

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