The point of the original post was to bring attention to the fact that the market is anything but free. Remember, ‘property’ is where the powers’ that be bury their treasure. It is completely in their interests to keep the price of property, especially real property, as high as practical. Of course, historically, the price of real estate has only gone up at the rate of inflation (what else could you ask for?), and the diversion from this mean is but a temporary blip, indicating a fairly obvious corruption within the system, but the advantages placing one’s wealth in real property are numerous. If you ‘own’ the land, then you control much of what happens on, by, through, underneath, and above it. It’s sort of like controlling the currency, but in real instead of virtual terms.
Right now you are watching the various institutions, especially the banks, and their lackeys, the appraisors, the RE agents, insurance people, all the way down the line, manipulating their little hearts out, but of course, in the end, the natural order of things wins out, much of the corruption is weeded out, and things return to “normal,” that is, getting screwed in a perfectly moral, legal, and acceptable way.
