Being a Contrarian Can Dull Your Prospects

How much does herd mentality dictate opportunities?

These charts on home ownership recall a 1996 presentation that I did in which I suggested that, while the housing "boom" had been going a long time and builders were printing quarter after quarter of records, major worries that it was all going to "roll over" "just around the corner" were probably not right, if only because home-ownership rates could move up another leg, against the backdrops of retirement booms in Phoenix and Florida, if for no other.

They did. I didn't. Gulp! *sigh*


(h/t Calculated Risk)

By the way, I'm unconvinced that sub-prime, at the margin, has greatly increased home ownership (and this is not what the Fed Atlanta studying is saying. The biggest years for sub-prime lending were 2005 and 2006, and you can see that homeownership rates did not nudge up).

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