This is a great thread and post, a lot of insightful thoughts from people with many years of experience in real estate. Albeit I'm definitely a newbie @ real estate investing (mostly due to analysis paralysis ha), I've been watching the broader market and the economy for years, mainly driven by my own interest and partially driven by the nature of my day-time job. Apology for the long winded intro to this post, but I'll get to my point as to why I think real estate along with other real assets (e.g. gold, BTC to the extent) will perform well in the next few years.
I do think we're witness and living at the proverbial "Fourth Turning" as eloquently coined by Mr. Neil Howe (great read btw, if anyone's interested, similar to Sapien, focus on the "big picture thinking"). There will be a fundamental shift in the landscape of what we perceive as the modern economy and already taking place of "de-globalization".
As we're witnessing in real-time, the Fed and government are running out of options; monetary policies have not been responding the way they did back in Great Financial Crisis in '08-'09 b/c while this will ultimately turn into a liquidity driven event, which providing liquidity to corporations could help, this is once in our life time black swan event. Undoubtably in my mind, the goon't will have to make some tough decision, unpopular ones such as bailing out the airlines and other leisure conglomerates such as Hilton Global - reminiscence of the '08/'09 bailout of Wall Street, though different to some extent as the airline / hotel type of "blue chip" stocks are majority owned by Fidelity and Blackrocks of the world, which in turn is own by major pension funds, and guess who's the largest holders or contributors of pensions funds, your everyday teachers, fire fighters, police officers and etc., so I would imagine the govern't won't have much of choice...
However, all this will inevitably to amount to the main street or everyday folks loosing faith in the centralized government planning and monetary policies (in this case they'll have no choice but to continue provide liquidity,, leading to the potential real black swan, which is inflation. An ugly term that we haven't seen in decades, but it's like the boogie man, if you say his name enough times, he'll show up... all this leads to my view on my investment thesis and 2 prone-approach: 1. assuming you've been discipline and waiting for the right opportunity to strike, you've build a formidable cash position, when the equity market retreat to a reasonable level (i.e. S&P around 1,800 - 2,000), it could be a good opportunity to invest in the market to reap the benefits. 2. now that you've build even a larger cash position through potential gains, it could be a good time to deploy that to the ultimate wealth building machine - real estate. I like real estate as a superior vehicle to accumulate and preserve wealth.
As a quote popularize by Mark Twain - History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Choppy water ahead my friends, but with discipline and sober planning, we shall navigate the turbulences and come out on top, stronger than ever.
Please stay safe and thanks for baring my long post.
