I admire Campbell for being one of the only people to write about selling real estate. You can find hundreds of books about buying RE, but how many are about selling it?
He writes about the cycles of real estate from his own experience, since he lived through 3 cycles himself. Campbell emphasises timing is more important thatn location.
Unfortunately, his index is not quite reliable, for it generates sell/buy signals at wrong times, and did not generate a buy signal for the current bubble until January 2003. He uses what he calls 5 Vital Signs: housing sales, building permits, loan defaults, foreclosures, and interest rates (weakest correlation).
He doesn’t use the metrics I discussed before, and doesn’t even mention them, so I don’t know if he tried them and found them useless or just didn’t have access to them.
He makes a convincing case of real estate’s cyclical nature, and by the time you finish the book, you realize that real estate cycles are as much a fact as night and day, winter and summer, rain and sun. You realize that people do follow the crowd, and that you make money by going against the crowd. Timing, not location, is the most important.
Campbell is certainly a trend setter in a field usually filled with rah-rah cheerleaders.
