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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (11844)	7/29/2003 3:39:22 PM
From: Tradelite	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

<<next 10 or more years of appreciation may have already been factored into the price? Maybe 20 years.>> No question that home prices probably won't by rising for a while, significantly. When I bought a home, I wasn't looking for it to make me a fortune. I was looking for a place to live the way I wanted and take advantage of the tax benefits. Maybe it was just to get away from all the disadvantages (for me) of renting. Do you believe all the folks buying homes the last few years expect to make a killing on those properties in the near future? Are you saying no one should ever buy one again for the next 10 or 20 years "until the smoke clears"? Anyone who thinks this way (and that seems to be the general tone of discussion on this thread at times) has, in my opinion, fallen into the habit of regarding real estate ownership as something akin to stock ownership. I'm not very good at holding stocks for long. That has cost me some money at times when the stocks went higher without me. Fortunately, I do not and will never regard real estate in the same way, but that's just me, I guess. There probably have been readers of this thread over the past few years who have been discouraged from buying homes because they bought into all the negativity about real estate prices. Or they've been confused about the differences between shorting real estate stocks (which is the main focus of the thread) and timing a real estate purchase to catch a supposedly "ideal" time. I recall one fellow who asked me a long time ago on this thread about buying a $350K home in the western part of my county. I told him at the time that if he found something good that he liked, he ought to stop worrying about waiting for prices to fall and buy it, because if he didn't, someone else would. (Same advice I've given every buyer client for years.) I hope he did buy, because if he's still waiting, he probably can't afford what's happened to home prices since then. There wasn't a single other voice on this thread that would have told him what I told him. I'm not about to change my advice today.