Real Estate Bubble Quotes

In the 1930s, there was a stretch where you could borrow more against the real estate than you could sell it for. I think that's what's going on in today's private-equity world.

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.

There is plenty of blame to go around for the U.S. housing bubble, but not much of it belongs to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two giant housing-finance institutions made many mistakes over the decades, some of them real whoppers, but causing house prices to soar and then crater during the past decade weren't among them.

The global boom in commodities fueled by a debt-financed infrastructure and real-estate bubble in China is over.

The Nasdaq bubble and crash were followed by the real estate bubble then subprime crash, which led to the unprecedented printing of trillions of dollars in an attempt to prevent a global depression.

The whole Ireland was taken over by greed and materialism. It was extraordinary. The price of every house had skyrocketed. If you were a small farmer and you had two fields outside, if you built 17 bungalows on them all, you become a millionaire, that kind of thing. It was extraordinary to see how rapidly that kind of ethic takes over a whole culture, but that's what's happened to us since the year 1998, about. It's completely extraordinary how little regard the culture had for the landscape. The country is now full of these half-built industrial parks and hotels.

So much value has been lost in the housing market that people are now buying. If there's any activity in the housing market, it's because values have plummeted to such depths that the 47% can now afford to live in a government-purchased house, or something like that.

If the banks become unreliable lenders, apartment prices will drop dramatically.

Housing was ground zero for the Great Recession. Between early 2006 and Obama's inauguration in 2009, average house prices fell by a third across the country. In certain areas, including cities as diverse as Akron, Orlando and Las Vegas, house prices fell by more than half.

Almost a decade removed from the foreclosure crisis that began in 2008, the nation is facing one of the worst affordable-housing shortages in generations.

I'm not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that's been happening for along time.

I got plenty of guesses wrong on things in the past as well. I don't want to pretend I have some great insight... But when the global financial crisis came along in 2008 it was scary times if you were in the middle of building $5 billion buildings. It wasn't perfect... I think that I am the luckiest person in Australia.

What happened in 2008 stopped people in their tracks. People stopped looking at their homes simply as commodities to exploit and starting thinking about how they might personalise that space and make them less bland and more autobiographical, and that's healthy, I think.

By 2003, every fool was getting into real estate. The checkout girl at my local supermarket handed me her newly printed real estate agent business card.

House prices just soared beyond - beyond reason in many places and they got financed in silly ways, and people lied about loans, all kinds of accesses entered into it. But that is what - that is the single biggest cause of why we're here.

I would say the biggest single cause was we had an incredible residential real estate bubble.

Americans now know that housing prices can go down and they can go down by 10, 20, 30, and in some cases, 40 or 50 percent. We know they can go down. But five years ago, we thought they could only go up.

New York periodically goes through a real estate crisis. I didn't subscribe to the school that real estate only goes up.

When we went crazy, and we did go crazy on residential real estate, it set things in motion that just - the dominoes started toppling.

In 2007, in the early 2007, everybody saw the housing market was falling, and at any given moment a lot of people thought it was going to fall more, and a lot of people thought it was going to rebound. You just didn't know.

When I saw houses in Palmdale going for $500K, I knew something was wrong. If you got foreclosed, I don't feel sorry for you!

The lower interest rates fueled housing and consumption booms in countries such as Spain and Ireland. At the same time, Germany, struggling with the burdens of reunification, tightened its belt and became more competitive. All this led to a wide divergence in economic performance. Europe became divided into creditor and debtor countries.

Check out London, Manhattan, Aspen and East Hampton real estate prices, as well as high-end art prices, to see what the leading edge of hyperinflation could look like.