I think I posted that little rant because I have hit the breaking point of everyone using hearsay, cliche, and talking points instead of pure facts and reality.

I disagree that we have a pure choice system now.

Interesting discussion.If you want to consider housing from a purely investment point of view, home ownership is certainly much different than other investments in large part due to the transaction costs, maintenance costs and information costs and taxes.Buying a stock or bond or commodity as an investment entails a transaction cost at both the time of purchase and sale - usually small relative to the size of the transaction.

I would evaluate this purely as a rental.

After that, read your guru books if you must.You will not learn squat about what I call the reality of realty from any guru book, what you will get are marketing ideas and learn some tricks, but some "programs" bridge on pure fraud!

Regarding rentals... this is a numbers game pure and simple.

The great thing Josh has done as a pure courtesy is extended pro accounts to top donors, making your donation a tax deductible marketing expense.

Originally posted by Igor Chudov:In other words, these auctions are a "new age psychological marketing gimmick" and not true "let's get rid of it in three days" types of true auctions.These are not auctions...these are lead generation systems, pure and simple...

You said right in your post, "I KNEW the values would go up in the future" That's pure speculation and the market has already shown that you can't know for sure it's always going to go up.

Granted, I am don’t know the exact numbers and am purely speculating but I think some of my assumptions will turn out to be pretty accurate as you dig into the numbers.