Blown Bubbles

Despite all the hype, Real Estate is NOT a sure bet.
One reason I've never been interested in RE other than what we use and enjoy.

Drop Foreseen in Median Price of U.S. Homes - NY Times:

"The median price of American homes is expected to fall this year for the first time since federal housing agencies began keeping statistics in 1950."

And Greenspan may have kept rates too low for too long:

Housing prices have previously declined for long stretches in various regions. Most recently, prices fell in California and in the Northeast during the recession of the early 1990s.

The current slump is different from that one, though, in both depth and breadth. In fact, the national median price rose only slightly faster than inflation from 1950 to the mid-1990s.

But as interest rates fell and lending standards became looser, prices started rising rapidly in the late 1990s, even in places like Chicago, which had rarely seen a real estate boom. The result was a “euphoric popular delusion” that real estate was a can’t-miss investment, said Edward W. Gjertsen II, president of the Financial Planners Association of Illinois. “That’s just human nature.”