“A house is somewhere that you live. That is something that people understand. It is not seen as an investment.”
I couldn’t disagree with you more. This sounds like Realtor-speak to me…aimed at snowing people into buying when simple logic and observation tell you otherwise. A house is the largest investment most people will ever make. Not treating it as such can be financial suicide. With a $500K tax advantage (for married, $250K single) it’s also a hell of a tax shelter if you time your purchase/sale properly.
“I don’t think that was the content of his post. His content was that you can’t time market top nor can you time market bottom.”
This is complete bull. It is far easier to time the real estate market than it is to time the stock market. You absolutely can’t compare the two. The real estate market is a slow-moving behemoth that plays itself out as a long drawn-out trend that anyone can see if they care to. The problem is that people get far more emotionally tied to their house than a stock. It’s far harder to take the emotion out of real-estate investments that it is to take the emotion out of your stock market investments (which most people can’t do either, by the way). I lost money in the 90’s in real estate because I was too emotionally tied to my primary residence. I didn’t make that mistake this time around.
As for RO, he sounds bitter. His generalizations about Piggingtonians is assinine. There is a great cross-section of RE professionals, RE investors, Current Homeowners, Former Homeowners, Lifelong Renters, Market analysts, etc. from all walks of life here. As I said in another post, I still think RO is actually Steve Rodgers, the CEO of Prudential. Rodgers weekly column in the SD Union home section reminds me of some of RO’s posts (i.e. picking out one slightly positive piece of random monthly data out of the plethora of negative, and harping on it to call a market bottom). That column has provided me with enough hysterics over the last two years that I don’t even have to open the Comic section anymore! Also, there are plenty of Piggingtonians with the means to pull the trigger on buying a new primary residence at any time, i.e. we don’t “need” the market to drop further to make a purchase, but because we view our primary residence as a key investment in our portfolio we continue to hold off until we are confident a bottom has been “put-in”.
