so you recognized the bubble – that’s great, you did better than most
why would you expect the recovery from that bubble to happen in 2 to 4 years?
if you look at typical SoCal real estate cycles, even in very general terms, we have 6 or 7 years of upward movement followed by 6 or 7 years of downward movement
peak in 2006/7 followed by 6 or 7 years of downward movement – you do the math
and, don’t forget to consider two significant factors:
1. this was the largest real estate bubble that has ever occurred on this planet – ever, as in, never before has there been a real estate bubble of this magnitude – how many ways can I say this?
2. after the bursting of past financial bubbles, people have shown an aversion to investing in the once-bubbly asset class for as much as a full generation
kudos to you for recognizing that a different approach to real estate may be appropriate
give some consideration to the idea that real estate investing may be a dead-end avenue for several more years and perhaps several decades (ala Japan)
right now, IMO, it is a ‘wait and see’ period for SoCal real estate – there are significant economic issues to be resolved at the local, state and federal levels before I will be willing to invest my money – one of the biggies is Prop 13 – can California survive economically without radically changing its property tax strategy? – it’s easy to say that Prop 13 will never be changed but would you invest in a 12 unit apartment building without at least considering what might happen to projected cashflow if Prop 13 went away?
another thread pointed out that our job base here in San Diego counts on start ups – no big companies choose to locate here – startups are dependent on capital streams that may not exist in the future – perhaps a ‘wait and see’ attitude is appropriate for our local job base as well – does San Diego have an economy other than tourism and house flipping? what happens to tourism in a recession/depression?
yes, there is a smattering of local technical work in support of the military – as one of those technical workers I would point out that the city has yet to recover from General Dynamics leaving in the mid-90’s – that was 15,000 jobs – many of them engineering / technician jobs – before you point to military/technical jobs as San Diego’s savior job-wise, please explain what has happened to these 15,000 employees in the last 15 years
if all of that is too much to sift through, perhaps we can boil it down to a single, simple question:
would you buy real estate in a bankrupt country like Greece right now?
several economists are pointing out that there are at least 7 American states in worse financial shape than Greece with California leading the list …
