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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 (67578)	11/29/2006 7:22:31 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

Yes, home ownership and education have been the two best investments for most of America -- those with the best education are the ones with the brightest future. Housing is a largely positional good, and as such it is very sensitive to bubbles. A house in a great part of a great city is not the same as a house in a free fire zone in a city with little to offer in the way of ammenities. One could say the same for a Harvard education, but for the most part education has a stronger practical value than it has a positional value. A home is a practical thing -- but since it is also such a positional thing its price will tend to get squeezed to the sky from time to time. Those who did not buy one got screwed -- this is a fact not lost on most people. You don't have to be brilliant to buy a house, not in the way you need to be brilliant to get into a good university. For the average person a house will be a good long term hedge. Housing prices are a bit nutty, but after dipping they will one day rise again and there will be people getting back on board. Those who don't will come to learn the painful lesson of inflationary environments, even stagnating ones. For the next few years renting will be a reasonable economic choice. But in the long run a house near the beach in Hawaii is the place to be.