Harvard Real Estate Zealot: Buy Low, Sell High!
Real estate entrepreneur and $100,000,000 deal maker Ken Wade has ridden in the front car of the real estate roller coaster through all three market cycles in the past 30 years, and he’ll tell you that today’s housing market is perfectly normal. There’s no nationwide housing crash, he says. But a media obsession with a few markets is driving negative market psychology — and prices — into the ground.
Just the Facts
In reality, Ken says, what we’re seeing isn’t an economic catastrophe, but the natural cycle that moves the market. He recently crunched some intriguing numbers about the U.S. housing market. Between Q1 2002 and Q1 2006, widely considered to be the peak years of the housing boom, Ken reports the following data:
- Only 25 markets, or 7 percent of the United States, experienced a true housing boom, defined by a four-year total home appreciation greater than 80 percent.
- Only 75 markets, or 20 percent of the United States realized total appreciation between 38 percent and 78 percent.
- Half of all local U.S. housing markets realized cumulative home price appreciation lower than 9 percent for that entire four-year period.
- Approximately 25 percent of U.S. local markets never realized even 6 percent total appreciation during those four so-called “boom” years.
The Nature of the Beast
Ken’s data show that a relative few free-falling markets have garnered a great deal of media attention. The ensuing media circus has helped to redefine public perception of the entire U.S. housing market market with trigger words words like: “housing crisis” and “mortgage meltdown.”
Ken is the Harvard-educated architect of the Housing Alerts’ Total Market Master program for research-based real estate investing. He has spent much of his career tracking local real estate trends and profiting from widespread price fluctuations. With his system, Ken translates the “buy low, sell high” adage into hard science and cold cash. We’ll talk about how he does it next week.
Tags: , economic catastrophe, Housing alerts, housing boom, housing crash, housing crisis, Ken Wade, market cycle, market psychology, media obsession, mortgage meltdown, real estate entrepreneur, real estate investor, real estate trends, Total Market Master