Monthly Archives: April 2012
Can You Get Hurt?
Thirty-five years ago, my brothers and I were buying all the real estate we could get our hands on in northern California. The market was moving sideways—if we saw a 2 to 3 percent price appreciation in a year, we were happy. We didn’t care—we were buying for the long term.
Tomorrow’s Market
What will real estate be like a year from now? Three years? Five years? Ten years?
If you knew that, you could position yourself to take advantage of coming changes. You could play the market for big profits.
I don’t have a crystal ball that can predict the future . . . and neither does anyone else. However, if we count on the future to be somewhat like the past, we can get some idea of how it should play out over the next decade.
Do Market Conditions Really Count Part 3?
However, their perspective was as jaded in the long term as those who saw only the boom market after the turn of the century. One saw only boom. One saw only bust. And neither made the connection.
Do Market Conditions Really Count Part 2?
The real estate market is like that. When it was booming in one of its great expansions roughly between 1999 and 2006, a person who saw it only then would, naturally enough, assume that real estate values always grow 10 to 25 percent a year. Many, too many, people made that assumption and bought one, two, or a dozen homes hoping to multiply their profits.
