C’mon Russell, we both you are way too smart to buy into the “Suburbia is a failed experiment, everyone will live downtown” crap. I also loved the part about “prohibitive inefficiencies of low-density construction.” That was beautiful, people who live on land are bad, get in the bee hive or else.
He is a publisher of women’s lifestyle magazines, specializing in gardening and shopping, he is also a professor of journalim at NYU. I am supposed to listen to his opinion of why people should live in cities, that people on land are wrong. This guy has never understood the people who like to live on land and own a gun, he never will and he’s no economist. The fact is that we westerners like our space, we don’t want to be anywhere near poor people and we won’t raise out family in manhattan, but a guy who writes articles about gardening and shopping for women’s magazines isn’t on my list of people I have a lot in common with.
scaredy, the panic you feel can be offset by the fact that forbes lists temec and mur and 2 of the 5 hottest markets in the country right now. The hundreds of houses changing hands are being reset, they will not default, order will one day be restored and every repo has a crowd of cash buyers waiting for it, hold off on panicing until nobody is buying. You may personally know FB’s but I personally know (and in a few case am related to) cash buyers who are snapping up deals at 30, 40, 50 cents on the dollar for a variety of reasons. Some are buying and having no mortgage so they can live pleasantly in retirement, others are buying cash positive rentals. The biggest problem is that you are approching it with the goal of making a profit, change that mindset, approach each deal with the attitude that the price will never go up, it will never appreciate, because appreciation is only realized when you sell, the posts above are not from flippers, they are from real people who want to live in reasonably priced homes that they can afford. If the numbers work purely from a monthly cost/benefit basis, then it is a buy, if you are looking for something “that will lead to profits,” this isn;t you market, short term profit taking and flipping only works during one third of the cycle, so for you, wait until things begin to swing upward, the same part of the cycle where the fb’s bought, just make sure you time it right.
