Is there a bubble?

Ok so I've been watching TV, reading magazines and the media can't stop talking about this bubble. Everyone is worried that this socalled real estate bubble is gonnah burst like the dot com bubble bursted in 1999. Here is some advice, not just from me, but also from my father who has been in the NYC real estate industry for 40 years. There is no bubble, happy? Can you sleep better now? Good! What's the difference between the real estate "bubble" and the dot come bubble? Well during the dotcom era, all these companies didn't really have anything, they weren't offering anything, it was all just air, ideas and dreams floating around, but nothing tangible. That's the key word in real estate "Real" Estate something that is actually tangible, something you can touch, something you can work out of or live in, something you can rent out and generate an additional income from. The Market was very hot the last few years, everyone knows that, it's been hot due to a few factors

1. After 9/11 the Country was in an economic nightmare, so Mr. Greenspan lowered the interest rates, to an unbelievable low. 2. After people lost millions in the dotcom craze, Enron or any of the other giant corporations gone bad, they lost there faith in the stock market and realized the value and potential in real estate. A Huge factor in the real estate market is supply and demand, when people started realizing the value in real estate and not having access to a huge amount of inventory, that's when bidding wars start, So now with the interest rates slowly rising, and more inventory is available the market is leveraging out. There is no way that the market will just plummet, it might slow down, but even with it slowing down, the market will still be hot and real estate in general will still be valued much more tomorrow then it was today. Remember in real estate, your not putting your money and counting on some hot shot greedy CEO to be in control of your investment, your in control of your own investment, and real estate has a 7 year market cycle.

I live in a huge 1000 sqft CO-OP, I bought 5 years ago this February, I paid $90,000 for it, since then it has nearly quadrupled, Let's just say that there is a bubble hypothetically, and hypothetically it does burst, does that mean that I will lose my investment of $90,000? No it doesn't, even if the market would drop 30-40% which would never happen, I would at the very least get double what I paid for. Remember as years go by, neighborhoods get better, crime goes down, real estate especially in this city gets harder to find and the market increases. Especially in Manhattan which is only 12 miles long and 2 miles wide, there is only so much real estate to own.

So I will leave you with this quote from Sopranos:

Remember what Tony Soprano once told his son AJ. "Invest in land, cause god aint making anymore of it"