Someone brought this up around five years ago for Phoenix/Tucson. Maybe around three years after the 2008 bubble burst....some middle-folks were showing up and buying several houses at a time, which the local markets were still 40-to-50 percent below what the market of housing was in 2007. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but if you had cash in your hand and just wanted to wait this out....then maybe it made sense.
Well....these were Chinese parties, and they had cash which they didn’t want to bring back into China or admit that they had. In some ways, it was money laundering. No one said the number of houses in this gimmick but I got the impression that at least twenty houses a month were being structured like this and rented out later.
In the rural regions (like Mississippi or Arkansas)....I don’t think there is a bubble existing. But I’d agree...in San Francisco, Seattle, and various metropolitan locations....it’s probably true.
One of the best stories I ever heard was a co-worker who walked into the Orlando market in 1990, and bought a property on some canal area...3-car garage, big pool in the back, and the price was in the 180k range. When he left in 2003....adding a dock and a big upgraded patio area...it was almost 900k that they paid. But it dropped like a rock after 2008.
Yeah. I moved to south central KY in 2011 to a home I purchased two weeks before the 2008 election (on a handshake). It’s still worth about what I paid for it, which is about what it was worth ten years before I bought it. They don’t have the wild price changes out here. That’s good. I don’t own it as an investment. I own it as a place to live. I expect to live here until I die, or enter a nursing home, whichever comes first.