America's crumbling housing market is suffering a further battering as thieves rip apart homes in search of copper wiring and pipes.

Greed for the red metal, which has experienced a fivefold increase in price in US scrap markets over the past three years, is damaging further the lowest tranche of America's real estate market as the US struggles to re-emerge from the worst housing recession for two decades.

According to police, policymakers in Washington and real estate brokers, some states in the US are suffering attacks on empty, foreclosed properties to steal copper wiring and pipes to sell to scrap metal merchants.

In Michigan and Massachusetts, which are incurring the brunt of foreclosures, real estate brokers have said that empty properties are often vandalised, forcing the lender to renegotiate the terms of the loan or, in some cases, withdraw altogether.

Mark Charney, head of Charney Real Estate in Brockton, Massachusetts, said: “It is a real epidemic. In areas where there are foreclosed properties, there is a 50 per cent chance of them being vandalised.

"There are a lot of people who are desperate and nobody cares. If they get caught, they get caught with a bunch of copper wiring and no one can prove where it came from.

“The damage caused is often disproportionate to the price of the copper they have stolen. Once the thieves rip out copper wiring and maybe a pipe from the front of a boiler, they could get perhaps $300 in cash at the scrap metal merchant. But the damage they cause could run to $15,000.”

Roger Kleinschmidt, a real estate broker who specialises in selling foreclosed properties in Cleveland, Ohio, said: “We get it all the time. People break into the foreclosed properties and destroy part of a home and just go straight to the scrap yard.”

Another real estate broker, in a wealthy area of Charlotte, North Carolina, said that he had seen instances where vandals had “stripped a house in 30 minutes”.

Jonathan Osman, a real estate broker in Charlotte, said: “They go for the air-conditioning units because there is so much copper in them. One of the problems is that theft like this is fairly low on the list of police priorities so nobody really bothers.

"But it is difficult to get a mortgage on a vandalised property. We have had cases where we had to go back to the bank to see if they will lend more to cover the repairs. Often they don't want to do this.”

The price of copper has soared over the past two years. The price of scrap metal in the US is roughly $3.50 a pound, compared with 70 cents three years ago.

Joe Belew, president of the Consumer Bankers' Association in the US, told The Times: “Banks are trying to find every reason to keep homeowners in their home and are making efforts to rework mortgages. But once the property is vandalised, things become very difficult.

"Once the physical condition of a property deteriorates, the collateral does as well. It is a real problem for the community because it slows down any recovery of real estate in the area.

"We already have 11 months of inventory waiting to be sold across the US, which compares with four to six months in a healthy market. This is slowing the process of getting the bulge of excess property out of the system.”

This month lawmakers in Michigan, the most depressed property market in America, will debate whether to introduce legislation that licenses scrap metal merchants and could penalise them for buying stolen metal.

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