Bueller? ..... Bueller?

You gotta love Ben Stein. He is truly a renaissance man who I have a great deal of respect for. This is nothing earth shattering, but I wanted to post it anyway.

From Ben Stein.

"In March of 1990, after two years of looking for a house during a hysterical real estate boom, I bought a modest home in Malibu for exactly $600,000. The real estate crash to end all real estate crashes began the next month. Within three years, I couldn'’t have given that house away. If I'd been able to sell it, I might have gotten $350,000 for it.

The price languished in the same miserable range for a few years, then revived, and then took off for the moon. By early 2005, I might have been able to sell it for $1.8 million.

“Then, in the early months of 2006, the real estate boom collapsed. I could put the house up for sale, but there are few buyers out there. I certainly couldn'’t get anywhere near what I could have gotten for it in early 2005.

There's a bit of a moral here. When real estate crashes happen, they rarely involve that elusive creature called "‘the soft landing." Yes, friends, when real estate starts to fall after a meteoric rise, it tends to fall hard."