"The 'RE-only-goes-up' crowd don't realize how many jobs and resources have been misallocated to the RE sector during the bubble inflation."

Beaker at RETalks 17 Aug 2010 4:42pm - “Had lunch with 3 business associates today where the topic of real estate came up. Two of them were from the lower mainland and one recently returned to Canada from Florida and now living in Toronto. The two from the lower mainland believed that BC “is different” and because of our diversity of economy and limited land RE was not going to go down and we had survived the global recession. The guy who just came back from Florida saw things differently and said he heard all the same talk in the USA back in 2005. The guys from BC insisted that the only way RE would fall is if we lost major jobs here, and that wasn’t going to happen due to Gov’t stimulus and diversity of economy (we are all in transportation infrastructure business). I gave my 2 cent and reminded them that the RE losses came first in the USA, then the job losses increased and the economy tanked after that.
I think that this is the missing part of the analysis with many of the “RE only goes up” crowd. They don’t realize how many jobs and resources have been misallocated to the RE sector during the bubble inflation. When all that RE apparatus starts to fall apart upon the bubble burst it is devastating to the economy.
Anecdotally, 99 out of 100 people I speak to still think Vancouver RE is a good investment. As soon as the last 1 out of 100 capitulates, I think we will see a long, slow decline that will last 5 to 10 years.”