“I was talking to a group of students I teach at a local community college. Nearly all of them own houses and condos, some of them own more than one property. Only one in ten could believe that real estate can go down.”

This from somewhere in Canada. Could just as well be BC, but probably TO.
bsallergy at greaterfool.ca 8 Oct 2010 10:12pm“I was talking to a group of students I teach at a local community college. They are all apprentice painters and decorators and the discussion was about real estate. Only one in ten could believe that real estate can go down. Of course these guys are painting the new mcmansions growing around the city and nearly all of them own houses and condos, in fact some of them own more than one property and were bragging about how they can’t lose and they’ve made all this money. When you have people in their mid 20′s talking like real estate genii it really has to be time to bail. This will be ugly.”

5 Responses to “I was talking to a group of students I teach at a local community college. Nearly all of them own houses and condos, some of them own more than one property. Only one in ten could believe that real estate can go down.”

  1. The media and government have broken the public trust. They have encouraged citizens to do dangerous and irrational things with their (very) limited income. It is the scandal of our time.

  2. Buy stocks!, said the shoeshine boy.

  3. Young people are buying in because, with their time horizons, gambling is close to a free call. What is the consequence of them folding? Going bankrupt with little to no assets anyways, compared to making a year’s salary by doing nothing? I think these types are doing the math just fine and the rush is unbelievable.

    Get ready for the hangover.

  4. The most amazing (and perverse) thing is that none of these young people understand that what they’re doing is gambling. They all know someone who made a killing flipping a condo, and that’s it. They’re hooked. They’re convinced the great canadian ponzi sch– er, the great canadian real estate market can only go up, up, up!

  5. @ Nick: lol… indeed… back in the tech bubble of 2000… cabbies in New York were trading stock tips.

    If college students, who don’t even have much in the way of work experience, are trading “flipping techniques,” you know the bubble is HUUUGE.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s