Come on out and try to buy one of those houses. Prices might come down some, but I wouldn't bet on any collapse. The worst downturn here in 30 years was after the earthquake in 1989 and throw in a couple of bad recessions in the early 90s that hit tech very hard. Mucho layoffs, including engineering folks. Unemployment 8 -9%. Even all that, a lot of people fleeing because of the earthquake and the unemployment, only hit houses to the tune of 20% or so. People have to live somewhere. They are already in those houses you mention, they still have jobs to go to five days a week. What are they going to do, sell and rent? And BTW, the average Bay Area house is not a million, more like 350,000 - 400,000.
tony, most tech stocks are up well above what they were a couple years ago. you're point?
Point is that people with options from companies like Cisco, Sun, JDSU, Juniper, Sycamore, Brocade, ORCL, BRCM, PMCS, Foundry, Corvis can already have a lot of shares in their pocket that they've exercised from a cost basis of near zero, and more years worth of option stock ahead of them. I don't expect those companies to fold. Some companies, like Cisco, also extend new options every single year, which produces something like dollar cost averaging.
One last thing, the Nasdaq also took a huge hit from March to May and house prices didn't flinch. Maybe too short of a period of time, granted. And how do people afford a 1 million dollar house? They sell their 750K house, put all the equity gain down on the new one and move right in. |
