how about we stop the food fight.?
ive been in the real estate biz for well over 2 decades. i've seen the same arguements before on the way up, and same rationalizations before on the way down. there certainly is a mass psychology component to real estate, although here is Socal developable sites, particularly along the coast are scarce and very valuable.
i posted this before - im a regular guy that got lucky and was too stupid to sell. i sold a duplex for about 4.5-times what i paid for it 18 years earlier. since i only put 10% down, i/we made about 40x our money - it was an expensive duplex and we made serious dough. i put $2k down on another place that is worth $700,000 to $800,000;. its now F&C - figure the equity yield on that baby. conversely, i saw people buy in 1989 and not get bailed out until 1999, and if you look at IR historys, thats when the FED started the death spiral. if FED hadnt gone so low(neg real rates), i doubt those people would have been bailed out even today. so if you bought recently with fixed IR, are not over-leveraged and probably will never have to sell, and you love the area & home, its no worrries. if you bought on the come, i think you are in for some hard times if you have ARM and are over-leveraged and subject to income irregularities, ie, software engineer, aerospace, etc.
i plan to keep one place in Socal. i have another place in a tax free state that i exchanged into and plan to occupy at some point. other na that, its passive income, passive income and more passive income. something would have to be a screaming dela for me to get interested. i can wait, ive seen this movie before.