Nonsense. Here's my former house on Zillow. The dollar sign is where I sold it.
And I am NO financial genius, if you saw the rest of my portfolio you'd be convinced of that.
When I saw people with $75K incomes buying houses in my neighborhood for close to half a mil, I knew it was time to head for the door.
No rational person could have thought that the housing boom of 2002-05 was permanent. There were a lot of crooks that kept saying it was though, and a lot of fools who listened to them.
The fact that you even thought about where the market was and where it was heading, that you even looked at a graph of the housing market, that you even considered at all anything but your desire and need for a house, puts you ahead of most home buyers, especially first time buyers. Most people were riding on the age old idea that real estate always gains in value over the long run. That idea has been blown to smithereens now and the housing market will never be the same.
Just a few years back there were comments by some on FR to the effect that it was “normal” to spend five years income on a house. I still remember when two years income was considered the limit.