March 20 (Bloomberg) -- Barbara Desoer, who runs the largest U.S. housing lender, can speak from experience about tumbling property prices: She couldn’t sell her own home.

Desoer, 56, put her 4,500-square-foot house in Charlotte, North Carolina, on the market Aug. 1 for $1.675 million. She had just been named head of Bank of America Corp.’s real-estate unit, Countrywide Financial Corp., in Calabasas, California.

The home, which she and her husband bought in 2000 for $1.15 million, sold in December for a price that wasn’t made public. The buyer: Bank of America, according to a proxy the lender filed March 18. Now the house is for sale again, at $1.295 million, $380,000 less than the original asking price, according to listing agent Allen Tate Realtors.

“The scary thing is the amount of inventory we have right now,” said Ed Baesel, a Charlotte real-estate broker with Cottingham Chalk Bissell Hayes. At the current pace of sales of $1 million-plus homes in Charlotte’s most expensive neighborhoods, it would take more than six years to sell the homes on the market, he said.

Million-dollar homes are finding few buyers as increasing job losses, slumping stock prices and declining property values cut demand for new and existing U.S. homes. Home prices fell 12.4 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, the most ever for an index compiled by the National Association of Realtors. In the Charlotte area, home to Bank of America, home sales have posted double-digit percentage declines every month since June 2007, according to the Carolina Multiple Listing Services.

Not Alone

Desoer declined to comment beyond information in the proxy, Bank of America spokesman Dan Frahm said.

Bank of America isn’t the only company stuck with an executive’s house that didn’t sell. AT&T Inc. bought Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson’s San Antonio, Texas, home for $1.7 million after relocating him to Dallas, according to a regulatory filing on March 11. AT&T spokesman Michael Coe declined to comment yesterday when asked whether the house was still on the market.

AT&T sold the homes of two other relocated executives, Ralph de la Vega and James Cicconi, at a discount, according to the filing. The company paid $3.05 million for Wireless President de la Vega’s house and sold it for $2.9 million. Executive Vice President Cicconi was paid $807,317 for his home, which was sold for $740,000.

As for the Desoers, Bank of America will cover costs associated with the sale of their house, including a possible loss, plus $1.5 million for costs connected to their new home in California and $1.1 million for tax-related costs, according to the proxy.

‘800-Pound Gorilla’

The Desoers’s home is in Charlotte’s Eastover neighborhood, which has the highest average house values in the city, Baesel said. Neighbors include former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl Jr. and former Wachovia Corp. CEO Robert Steel.

Wells Fargo & Co.’s purchase in January of Charlotte-based Wachovia, formerly the fourth largest U.S. bank, is also sparking more home listings amid weak demand.

“The 800-pound gorilla in Charlotte is what is going to happen to jobs at Wachovia and Bank of America,” Baesel said.

Bank of America bought Countrywide in July for about $4 billion. The lender plans to eliminate the Countrywide brand next month, replacing it with Bank of America Home Loans. The real- estate unit has been a star performer for the bank this year, aided by a boom in home refinancings, Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lewis said on Feb. 26.

“Volume is good, application quality is holding up and the acquisition of Countrywide is really paying off for us with the additional capacity,” Desoer said in a March 11 interview. “Thank goodness we have it.”

To contact the reporter on this story: David Mildenberg in Charlotte at dmildenberg@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 20, 2009 12:53 EDT