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Playboy Bunny or Real Estate Investor?

Gary send in these very interesting comments:

Geez, just as the dot.com distorted the allocation of capital and resources (i.e., too much broadband, not enough energy infrastructure), so to is the housing bubble!

What is he referring to? He was pointing to this article in the Washington Post:

"It feels as if Playboy's Playmate of the Month for May is speaking for the entire country.

Fort Lauderdale native Jamie Westenhiser, 23, told the magazine recently that she is ditching her modeling career to take up real estate investing.

In the magazine's May issue, Westenhiser poses in her lacy lavender baby doll, wearing nothing else except furry boots, leaning on a computer desk next to a stack of books with titles including "All About Escrow" and "Real Estate Principles." In her "playmate data sheet," she writes that her ambition in life is to have a "successful career in real estate."

That's correct, a potentially lucrative career as a model is being tossed aside for real estate investing. Gary calls that a "misallocation of resources."

And apparently, you don't need to be a scantily clad purty young thing to do it:

"A recent study by the National Association of Realtors showed that almost 25 percent of homes bought in 2004 in the United States were bought as investments. That's up a whopping 14.4 percent, compared with 2003. David Lereah, chief economist for the association, said the organization was surprised by how big the investors' share of the market had become."

Those numbers initially sounded pretty high to me; I;ve been seeing more and more confirmation in other data that they might be accurate after all.

My position that this isn't a bubble looks less tenable with each passing day . . .

>

Source:
Everybody's an Investor Now
With Home Prices Rising, Investors Play a Risky Game of Anticipation
Daniela Deane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 21, 2005; F01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/20/AR2005052000576.html

Sunday, May 22, 2005 | 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (2)
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Comments

Barry,

The number is closer to 42% of all sales are non owner occ. And frankly, I don't know which I'd like to pop first, the playmate or the bubble....but I would love to pop both...

Posted by: The Nattering Naybob | May 22, 2005 2:38:41 PM

Who was it who said “When your elevator operator starts giving you stock tips, it's time to get out of the market”?

Posted by: Dave Schuler | May 22, 2005 2:53:53 PM

I think it was the shoeshine guy, wasn't it? Though for the Morgan Stanley guy, I believe it was the allegorical plumber.

The recent Apprentice had a suspicious number of real estate related folk as candidates too, but then they all wanted to work for the Trumpster, so maybe that's normal.

Posted by: mh497 | May 22, 2005 9:26:21 PM

i read somewhere recently about the index of RE agents being at all time high as percentage of the population... correlates well to booms and busts.

proff investors miss the point about why man in the street prefers to pump up RE and not put money into vicariously run funds...... he doesnt trust those running the funds.

overcharging, poor performance, dishonesty etc etc. can you imaging patronizing a restaurant that treated you that way?

Posted by: canyonal | May 23, 2005 8:11:39 AM

This story cries out for the kind of methodical research one would customarily associate with Modern Portfolio Theory. It seems to me that for Miss May, 2005 to deprive the nude modeling industry of her talents to pursue a career in real estate is what I'd characterize as a classic misallocation of assets.

Accordingly, I'm going to volunteer to go through the last 50 years of Playboy and will in due course report back to you with my findings as to whether Playmates of the Month entering the real estate field is meaningfully correlated with prior tops in the market or not.

In the interim, I'm selling my home, shorting the REITs, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the S&Ls and I'm looking for other pure plays to capitalize on this important development.

Best to all,

Tom

Posted by: Tom | May 28, 2005 6:45:33 AM

hiya i lov playboy

Posted by: emily | Jan 27, 2006 8:18:33 AM

hiya i lov playboy

Posted by: emily | Jan 27, 2006 8:18:36 AM

hiya i lov playboy

Posted by: emily | Jan 27, 2006 8:18:41 AM

Playboy is so awesome i love the hot guyz!!!!!!!!

Posted by: Kinky Bitch | Apr 6, 2006 1:44:28 PM