If you've been waiting for the economy to straighten itself out, and for the real estate market to be clearly on the way up, you're waiting too long. History has shown over and over again that those who act before there is certainty are the ones who make the most money. Since most purchases and sales are, in reality, driven by family issues and not by national ones, that's not so hard to prove.
We bought a condo in 1981, when the economy was bad. We got a great price on it, and we moved in. We were getting ready to have kids, and there were no children allowed, so we put it on the market and bought a house. As soon as we moved into the house (the day we closed, in fact), we found out I was pregnant, and we'd bought a one-bedroom house. Although we planned to renovate, another, bigger one came on the market up the street, so we bought that too. What were we thinking? Anyway, the two houses were both bought in 1983, and the first was sold that year, as well as the condo. We made money on the condo, since we'd been the first to move in. We made no money on the little house. The value of the second house doubled in the the first couple of years, as the market went wild in the mid-80s.
What's the lesson here? You could reasonably say that it is to think ahead before you buy, but that's not my point today. My point is that we made almost all the appreciation on the house that we owned when the market started to rise. We also made money on the condo on that theory. The little house we only owned for a few months, and we would have made money there if we had been willing to own three homes for longer. It's a version of timing is everything, but it requires buying early in a cycle. People who waited until later in the 80s got caught in a declining market after 1988, and weren't able to get out for what they had paid.
The parallel to today's market is: If you wait until everything is rosy, the money will have already been made by those who bought sooner. Buy now.
