[The once and future king]

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In my experience this is a typical response from someone on this forum that doesn't do any real estate investing.

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Wrong. I have done very very very well out of real estate inthe last 5 years. I just realise that now there are much better ways to invest my money. Get out at the top and in at the bottom.

You say that "real" real estate investors should pray for a time like now. LMAO.

So as RE appreciated over 120% in the last 5 years you were going:

"These yearly massive capital gains are so meh, give me negative YOY growth any time, then Ill make a killing."

You talk about making an income, well I cant debate with you there, as I am in the UK. Here rental yeild is bellow what I can get just by putting my money in a standard current account. So income from rental is piss piss poor in the UK at the mo, I have to admit I am unaware of the US situation.

As for finding motivated sellars, that is all well and good, but is meaningless when there are no motivated buyers. Without motivated buyers and falling prices, the nightmare of negative equity become more real, however much you managed to discount your purchase by.

If you cant sell it on or rent it out, and the price continues to fall, busto. As the pool of buyers shrinks and shrinks, finding buyers who wont themselves demand a discount becomes harder and harder. I have just sold on the majority of my portfolio and it was much much harder than even 6 months ago, and we still have positive growth in the UK. It is turning into a buyers not a sellers market.

Prices will fall for at least 3-4 years. The reasons are crystal clear.

What has fueled HPI in USA is the massive supply of easy credit and fog a mirror mortgages. This situation has recently gone into massive reverse. Commercial and Investment Banks have had to make huge billion dollar write downs because of all the easy credit they handed out like confetti. Now they will do the opposite. They will try to attract savers, and will only lend to those with healthy credit and will demand more money down.

Thus unlike the previous 5-7 years, were demand was massively exaggerated by easy credit, much of that demand will have mostly disappeared overnight. This is because there has not been a housing bubble, there has been a credit bubble, and that bubble has totally poped, just as when the credit bubble inflated RE inflated, when the credit bubble deflates so does RE.

So in summary, in your synopsis of the market, you totally ignore one key element, buyers. Its one thing to buy at a discount, but without buyers to sell onto it can easily become a very costly mistake. Obviously if you can still get good rental incomes in Yankland, that goes a long way to mitigating my entire arguement and I would be interested to hear what yields are in Yankland. However Yield is allways pretty piss poor if the value of your house falls below the sum you paid for it, a very real possibility imo. Nevermind the ever constant reality of having voids at the same time.

In closing I would have to say that you sound like the typical RE investor, who has little understanding of other investment possibilities and the macro economics that set the context in which the RE market exists. You also seem to be making the typical mistake of judging future performance by past performance even though the economic geography of the whole market has totally changed in the last 2-3 months.

Op is total RE noob, 3 years ago he could have probably stuck a pin in the property pages bought waited a year and chances are he turned a healthy profit, now the opposite is likely.This might be a time when a very experienced RE investor can make some $$$ if he is super canny and lucky, but for a noob, it is not the time to get involved.

To the OP, I would say before deciding on a market to enter, learn general investing and economic principles, then examine the economic situation we are now in, you will see that there are a lot better possibilities to make money than Real Estate.