"For all the talk about the dow and sp, gold has gained amost triple." and gold is still exceptionally cheap by all metrics available.
The only caveat to the home vs gold arguement is that there is a much smaller supply of gold and precious metals. In chicago supply for houses is exploding.
Wait until a recession comes, unemployments will force people to sell their houses at a discount prices; there goes the housing market, it's time to buy if you have the money. At the moment, housing inflation caused the standards of living to increase signficantly; many young people can't afford a house, rents also increased, foods and entertainments also followed, life in general is tougher as the result. If you are greedy to make money, you should let the housing market to crash before considered investing, a wise investment indeed.
We also have 9 lives...and live to fight another day. If there is not a lot of liquidity (like in RE)...it pays to put in your offer earlier rather than later...the whole pigs vs. hogs thing i was talking about. You cant see the future, so cash in while you can.
Maybe there is a problem in housing, but the point is how will the government respond. They will print money like they have never printed before. Bozo Bernake is already on the record as the biggest money printer on earth.
of housing crashing or bottoming out is based on anecdotal evidence and people talking their position. I've got friends talking NY RE down since they are still waiting for a Brooklyn brownstone to make a roundtirp from 300k 25 years ago to 1.5M back to 300K. Unless people start taking their family out of their homes to live short-term at the YMCA or even cheaper in a refrigerator box , your best bet to anticipate a house bottoming out IN YOUR AREA is to take a spread chart of house rentals vs. house price and buy RE when the spread stops shrinking and start to flatten. I remember seeing that spread chart 3 years back and it looked like a coffee chart in a frost.
You can't print money to fix a long term problem; it will only depreciate the value of a dollar. In the previous recession, the fed cut interest rates to help boost the housing market, but then it's going to be like the S&L problem in the 80's, the housing market crashed big time after ward. You can't suppress a wave because it's going respond with another bigger one. I think this is a typical manuever of the fed during a recession, but have some consideration for the living standard in general, a rise in housing will also increase the sandard of living, it would be much easier if you only need half as much as it used to be to live comfortably.