Real Estate people: I want to buy a house, advice?

[natedogg]

One thing I've noticed about real estate: don't buy in urban areas with tons of room for development unless you can afford to buy in the impacted center of the population.

Las Vegas, Phoenix, Sacramento, Austin, are surrounded by wide open spaces to build on. I don't know about the Austin market but Las Vegas and Phoenix and Sacramento have tanked badly, precisely because builders overbuilt during a price runup. It's too easy. There's nothing but room. As soon as things go sour, the builders have a backlog of a year's worth of projects still building. Vegas, Sacramento and Phoenix are so flooded with properties that nobody can sell anything anywhere close to what they bought it for in 2005-6.

Places with no room to grow are where you should buy, but of course, they are already pricy. However, they aren't going down. If the housing prices of a major impacted urban center go down, then everyone's in trouble at the time too, but your longterm prospects are even better if you can buy property cheap in a place like that while everyone is negative. (e.g. NYC 2001-2, they were giving property away relatively speaking)

natedogg