DCARLSO, if you are really Dean Carson I just checked out your site and the link to market conditions. If that is you and you wrote the narrative it was pretty realistic and in line with a lot of people think on this site. The note about subprime hurting the low end and entry level while the median price being artificially held up by the million plus market. I especially like the part about good neighborhood with the best schools are the best bet, makes sense to me.
I do take offense to the accusations that those of us who are fence sitting lack bravery or those of us who wish calamity on others are somehow playing with karma. While I am not in the R/E business I have owned homes through more than one cycle and intend to learn from my own history of being upside down and from making a sizable profit. Most of us have many friends and co-workers who have taken the bait and purchased beyond their means, zero down, interest only, neg am, etc. and we have also seen those and others take their equity out. We didn’t think any of that was wise and over the past few years we may have voiced our opinions only to be proven wrong by a market that behaved in a way that blew all the records away. I made money overall in the dot com craze but I would have made more had I gotten conservative near the end, if only I had seen it coming. Today’s S.D. real estate market has the same feel to me, the writing on the wall is too cogent and I intend to analyze the data and make a sound investment decision. In the dot com boom I ignored time tested fundamentals about P/E while I was suduced by the fact that I had cashed out my initial ivestment and was “playing with the house’s money.” I say you put down the Tony Robbins books for a while and pick up Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching “If you want to grab the world and run it, I can see you will not succeed…Manipulators mess things up, grabbers lose it.” Just a little excerpt from a 1000 bc sage, the ying yang guy, it’s funny because in that 3,000 years it has always been the same, what goes up comes down, flexible is better than strong. And if he were alive today I wonder if he would ammend it to say that all things will find balance except coastal real estate in good school districts. Maybe
