Funny — it was common knowledge among my colleagues that we were in the midst of an out and out period of mass insanity wrt housing prices and that a crash was imminent and inevitable.
Yup. My wife was in real estate and she came home one day and said the banks no longer required that the mortgage payment be only ~30% of your income. The increased it to 50%. That was the first of the crazy steps to the bubble burst. And I saw it for what it was. It’s why we rented in SEATTLE from 1997-2011 and saw our rent go DOWN the whole time, while house prices were skyrocketing. All the renters were becoming buyers. ;-)