Wouldn’t Life Be Great If We Each Had a Genie In a Bottle?

All the time, I am engaged by folks who desperately speculate and pontificate real estate speculation. I have been told by an easy one hundred self-presumed experts in the past six months that they know just how long our “bust” will last and exactly how much thousands of property values will be impacted. I read local and national publications try to figure out a way to report on the economic events of late with a spin attractive enough to maintain and hopefully increase their dwindling subscription base. Similarly, real estate professionals, and so often agents, can be found chattering amongst ourselves incessantly in search of a voice that interprets and represents the current market in such a way as to motivate our clients to actually close on a contract. We are all in it for the money. Buyers and sellers too. It’s the mutually beneficial and sometimes detrimental catch-22 of capitalism.


More importantly, the fact of our real estate matter is that a home sold yesterday—now available for far less today (with perhaps a couple incentives thrown in at closing)—is a good deal in the least. Add the fact that the price of a rather significant portion of both residential and commercial properties has already adjusted well enough to be far more than reasonable to many more pockets and purses. Is this what “bust” means to you?


Furthermore, I am personally not against the encouragement of home ownership among as many folks as possible. In fact, it is an American right I feel we should all strongly defend. The home I sell to the newlyweds today WILL turn into their children’s college funds in the future and that’s all good, pending we avoid World War III, devastation of the environment and global infection by some deathly contagious virus. Otherwise, there is no reason why the first real estate “bubble” of the 21st century will shortly create ghost towns with dust bowl crossings, thousands across the country, and millions of displaced folks now so poor they bury their dead in someone else’s backyard.


Today… is the time to buy, especially if you are secure in your current position and able to put in the effort of making money work for you, though it may no longer be made quite so easily.


ps. The days of countless flippers and mover-uppers who took great risks in order to reap great rewards, remind me of shopping at the mall with my parents when I was a kid. Although I wanted money to buy cool things, I didn’t always get what I wanted and sometimes we drove home empty-handed. No worries though, my parents owned their own house.