asianautica: I’ve got news for you. I saw this thing coming as far back as the middle of 03 and started making a plan where we would sell our home and move out of CA in the spring of 05. We did just that and although we may have missed the tip top by several months, we were pretty close. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist with a PHD to see what was going to happen to the housing market in CA. Demographic information on each city and state is only as far away as a Google search and when you look at income vs the price of housing in CA………anyone who paid any attention to this matter would come to the conclusion that home owners in bubble markets were likely to be where they are today. I have several friends who did exactly what we did and sold within a month or two of when we sold our home. They either became renters or moved out of state to places where housing prices were in line with median incomes.
You can spin it anyway you want but there ARE plenty of people on this site and others who called this bubble-burst within months of the initial downturn and they called it as much as two to three years before it happened.