If you look past his “white trash” writing style, the guy does make some good points. Namely, how many of us will want to buy real estate at the bottom of the cycle, when our jobs are in jeopardy (if we even have one), inventory keeps rising, foreclosures dot the neighborhood, and we have dozens of acquaintances who can’t even get someone to look at their homes; real estate will seem like a super risky purchase. Second, how many of us are mad we missed the runup. (I should have bought investment properties but am not mad.) How many of us would own a house if we had moved here just a few years earlier, or graduated from school just a few years earlier? We would have bought at bubble prices too, but we were too late into the game and didn’t buy because we are truly priced out.
However, the white trash poster missed a couple things too: we expect real estate prices to fall a lot more than 30%, you *can* find the bottom (thanks to jg’s charts for proving that point), some of us *did* enter the markets in 2001, and most of us qualify for a home purchase now but chose *not* to make it. Everyone I met on this forum is a white collar professional, independent thinker with a very good income, so the choices made by our group reflect the independent and contrarian thinking, not any lack of money to buy a house. We’ve got people who *sold* their homes at last year and are renting until prices come down, and others with 6 figure incomes who could easily qualify for a McMansion but choose to rent instead waiting for the bubble to pop.
So the guy completely missed the fact that we are the smart contrarians, like the people who dumped stock in early 2000 and bought it back in 2001.
