You are defending your consulting line of work and I am pointing out the vast number of people that are making foolish choices because they do not consult somebody like you.
As I posted before, I am sure that you advise your clients to take value into consideration and a property in a certain location in North Carolina may be a totally different animal than a condo on the glutted and overpriced Miami Beach condo market where a very large number of condos are owned by flippers, like my relative, who are now sweating bullets. (Are you sure you don't want to buy that Miami Beach condo from my relative?)
Remember the days when you could buy an investment property at good value with fixed rate financing without having to bid against the Burger King manager that was bidding $600,000 that he could never hope to repay because that amount of money was made available to him by irresponsible gimmick loan instruments?
That artificial inflation of selling prices drastically affects whether or not real estate is good value in many markets.
My real estate equity exceed yours and accounts for less than one third of the net worth of my total investments. Once real estate returns to being a good value instead of being a Ponzi Scheme in the markets I am interested in, my real estate holdings will increase.
The current irresponsibility by lenders and by the average buyer with gimmick loans is making real estate more of a gamble than an investment. That goes for you, for me and for your clients.
Making money in the game and having clients make money in the game is not a measure of the soundness of the game. When Charles Ponzi's scheme was collapsing, Ponzi paid out $2 million in three days to nervous investors and those lucky dogs made a great profit.
Only the suckers holding the bag at the end of the game lose the money that everybody else won in the game.
In many real estate markets where prices have been artificially and drastically inflated by gimmick loans, the early sellers will make a profit, the real estate agents and advisors will make a profit, the last buyers holding the bag will have the properties foreclosed and the banks that traded good money for grossly overpriced real estate (as Japanese banks did in the 1980's) will cry like stuck pigs to Uncle Sam for another Savings and Loan Bailout.
So, the last sucker that that will end up paying for the game will be:
The U.S. Taxpayer.
