Housing Bubble History: Book Covers From 2005-Present
I ran across this funny image on Imgur and just had to recreate it with a bit more detail. All of these books are by the same author, David Lareah, along with the publishing dates of each book. (The first two books are essentially the same book with different titles.)
Hover your mouse cursor over each book cover below to see the full titles, the progression is both funny and sad. Or, you can click on each book cover to see the corresponding Amazon book page. Comparing old and new reviews for the books can also be a nice lesson in investor psychology.
Now, which popular books of today will be the jokes of tomorrow?
By Jonathan Ping | Funny, Real Estate | 5/6/11, 5:06am
May 6th, 2011 at 5:55 am
Thats what I call a great track record. I’m going to make sure to pre-order his next book! What will it be?
May 6th, 2011 at 6:28 am
i hope he publishes another idea, so i can short it.
May 6th, 2011 at 6:34 am
Ah, the Housing Bubble version of “Dow 36000!”
May 6th, 2011 at 8:16 am
I was looking at a property that sold for $38,000 in 5/1998. In 4/2005, it sold for $240,000 (632% increase) and, big surprise, it is now bank owned. The bank is now asking $189,900 (500% increase). Absurd! I will not pay more than $60,000, which assumes a 3% annual increase. I doubt they will accept my offer.
May 6th, 2011 at 12:01 pm
JP Mitchell – That’s an enormous difference! Just curious, what do http://Zillow.com and http://eppraisal.com/ say the house is worth?
May 6th, 2011 at 12:17 pm
Just like the delusions of tulip mania in the 1600s, investors can easily get fooled into thinking that there is such a thing as a “sure bet” like a market-priced house or a certain stock or commodity. Just today, I read three different articles about the issues related to TIPs. I never truly understood them so I never invested in them or in a basket of them like Vanguard’s Inflation Protected Securities – apparently these are not as safe as people were led to believe. Just looking at the name, it sounds like a poor advertising scheme for suckers – no investment is “guaranteed”, “safe”, or “protected.”
May 6th, 2011 at 12:53 pm
ron – hey, don’t knock TIPS! They’re the safest thing out there. (But safety isn’t always cheap.) They’re just like nominal treasurys, except instead of an inflation expectation baked into the rate, it’s separate and automatically linked to the CPI-U rather than just an expectation.
If you’ve read the same TIPS articles I read today, I think you’ll be seeing some rebuttals and maybe even some retractions in the days to come. I don’t think the writers knew what they were talking about. The articles didn’t bother to mention 5-yr nominal treasurys have an even worse real yield based on inflation expectations than 5-yr TIPS right now, it’s just the TIPS published real yield saves you having to do the math to figure that out.
May 6th, 2011 at 1:24 pm
@Dan – I sure hope you are right. Watching the $14,355,000,000,000 on the US debt clock is compelling. For “them” to be able to “promise” paying off TIPs is getting tougher to believe.
May 6th, 2011 at 7:32 pm
What a great illustration of the housing boom. We’ve watched our home drop down into the depths. We are just thankful to be in a home we can afford.
May 7th, 2011 at 1:43 am
You missed the funniest part of David Lereah’s story: his book in 2000.
“The Rules for Growing Rich: Making Money in the New Information Economy”
http://www.amazon.com/Rules-Gr.....038;sr=8-3
May 7th, 2011 at 5:47 am
It’s a lot like those “DOW 38,000″ books that have been printed. Maybe eventually, but I have doubts that it will be in the timeframe given.
May 7th, 2011 at 7:35 am
This post is awesome. I graduated from university in 2007 and I can’t even count the number of people who told me I was foolish for not buying a house immediately after school…”Prices aren’t going down anytime soon!”…I guess it’s easy to laugh now.
May 8th, 2011 at 5:02 pm
@Wanderer
We sold our house in 2006 not because we thought that housing was going down, but our kids were on their own and we just wanted to rent. You can’t believe how many people told me I was idiot for selling and not buying. By 2009 the same people were asking, “how did you know?”. I went from idiot to brilliant in 4 years, go figure.
May 8th, 2011 at 10:26 pm
That reminds me of the signs on the new condo buildings around here. The signs used to exude luxury, lifestyle, etc. now they sound desperate. Seriously one says “Worth a Second Look.” Another is “Unprecedented Value.”