Who is watching the internet gurus?

[James York]

I suspect I’m not the only one drawn to all the internet gurus claiming the sky is falling. How do you balance awareness of an alternate point of view with maintaining your sanity? I feel the market is a safe place to be, but I’d be lying if I said sometimes the YouTube videos can make me feel like I should sell it all and brace for impact. 

[JD Martin]

Anyone who "hopes" for a crash needs their head examined. For all the blustering and "I'm keeping powder dry" people bragging about how they're ready to jump in and pounce on all these dollar deals, the reality of a true real estate crash is a lot of economic devastation that bleeds into all sectors of everything. 

What I find curious is why the "crash" people don't already own several thousand single family homes or apartment complexes they bought for pennies on the dollar in 2008 or 2009. That really was a golden buying time, if you could also afford to have vacant properties sitting for several years.

I suspect the answer is that most of the "I hope there's a crash" people were never RE investors (or investors of any kind) 15 years ago and don't really have a good understanding of how it affects everything. I worked with a whole lot of investors and ancillary RE professions during that time - engineers, architects, surveyors, utility contractors, etc. Conservatively 75% of them didn't survive the downturn. 15 years later it's still difficult in town to get utility work done because all of the contractors that went under, virtually none came back as things improved. 

Everybody is a genius in hindsight. The reality is when things went down in 2007 there were a lot of homes & land around in my town that had no buyers, even at distressed prices, because no one could access credit and no one who had real cash reserves at the ready wanted to take chances blowing those reserves not knowing how long the shakedown would last. I think it took until about 2016 for most of the foreclosures to shake out where I am almost 9 years after things went south.