LA Times on the housing bubble, complete with unsophisticated buyers using their retirement funds to buy speculative property sight unseen.
They’re cashing in retirement funds, selling stock and taking out second mortgages. They’re pouring the money into real estate, often in distant states, often without seeing the property.
One sight-unseen buyer went to his property
He went to visit his dirt.
It wasn’t quite the way he imagined. “It was steeper. And there’s a lot of rocks. Big rocks.”
Well duh.
From Angy Bear, quoting a Miami broker
In Miami, Ron Shuffield, president of Esslinger-Wooten-Maxwell Realtors, predicted that a limited supply of land coupled with demand from baby boomers and foreigners would prolong the boom indefinitely.
“South Florida,” he said, “is working off of a totally new economic model than any of us have ever experienced in the past.”
This is precisely the same snake oil manic bullshit we heard just before the dot coms tanked and took the stock market with it. Much of that money (what was left of it anyway) went into real estate, fueling this new bubble. And it’s about to pop. Interest rates are rising, and in the surest sign of all, when mainstream investors are flocking to new investments and people are saying this is different, it’ll go on forever, then it’s a given that 1) the peak has already been reached and 2) the savvy investors are selling to the incoming rubes.