Because there are so many of them, I shifted articles on the Bay Area real estate market and home mortgage interest rates to seperate blogs: Bay Area Real Estate Watch (link) and Home Mortgage Watch (link). However, I have so much respect for Buffett, I thought I'd also post it here:
Buffett: "A lot of the psychological well being of the American public comes from how well they've done with their house over the years. If indeed there's been a bubble, and it's pricked at some point, the net effect on Berkshire might well be positive [because the company's financial strength would allow it to buy real-estate-related businesses at bargain prices]....
"Certainly at the high end of the real estate market in some areas, you've seen extraordinary movement.... People go crazy in economics periodically, in all kinds of ways. Residential housing has different behavioral characteristics, simply because people live there. But when you get prices increasing faster than the underlying costs, sometimes there can be pretty serious consequences."
Munger: "You have a real asset-price bubble in places like parts of California and the suburbs of Washington, D.C."
Buffett: "I recently sold a house in Laguna for $3.5 million. It was on about 2,000 square feet of land, maybe a twentieth of an acre, and the house might cost about $500,000 if you wanted to replace it. So the land sold for something like $60 million an acre."
Munger: "I know someone who lives next door to what you would actually call a fairly modest house that just sold for $17 million. There are some very extreme housing price bubbles going on."
Full Article: http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/01/news/fortune500/buffett_talks/#realestate
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