The funny thing about bubbles is that sooner or later they burst. Once again I get to be the master of understatement. What fun!
After having survived these past 2+ years as each of us has watched the housing bubble burst in most parts of the country and deflate everywhere else, we are being told that [...]
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Joshua Dorkin
Charles Feldman

Ted Karsch.





Building Value vs. the Bubble Mentality
by Brendan O'Brien | August 25, 2009One of my favorite economics bloggers, Megan McArdle, wrote a post recently on the Washington, DC real estate market, extended to the state of the market overall. It appears to her that the single-family residential market has bottomed out, while multifamily still has a way to go.
Megan also posed the question of when, and if, a boom will begin again. Possibly, in her view, there won’t be a boom. After all, the last nationwide (really, worldwide) boom was driven by a couple of unusual factors: historically low interest rates, and a big, competitive market for subprime loans.
Megan is one of the smartest economic bloggers, and a lot of what she wrote here makes sense. Still, the post bugged me, because it focused on macro-economics, which is not the world in which most of us live.
We know that real estate investing success comes from a million factors, only one of which is the boom-bubble-bust cycle. Outsiders don’t see a lot of difference between real estate investing and stock market investing, but there is a huge difference. In stock market investing, there are really only three factors:
All those apply, in a sense, to real estate investing. You have to decide what and where to buy, pick one or more properties at what seems to be an appropriate price, and figure out when to offer them for sale, at what price. But there are also these factors:
Price Factors Exclusive to Real Estate
You can probably think of a few more. The point is that in between the buying and the selling, most stock market investing is essentially passive. Once you own it, you’re waiting for the right time to sell it. You really have no say over how the company is run.