I’ve lived in Palo Alto since 1984. The local papers around here (the Palo Alto Weekly and the Daily News) are funded almost entirely through ads for real estate, so it’s pretty easy to keep one’s pulse on real estate by way of how many ads there are, how large they are, and what they emphasize. I will say, however, that in the past 35 years, I have never witnessed two particular words of the English language until now.
Since there’s no great way to paraphrase this, I’m just going to share with you this clipping from the morning paper, which I encourage you to read in its entirety. And, no, this isn’t The Onion.
Here in my hometown of Palo Alto, the fervor about real estate is definitely gone. A couple of years ago, it was absolutely manic (see chart below, which you can see yourself in SlopeCharts with the symbol $PALO). Chinese buyers were paying all cash. Facebook and Google employees were trying to outbid each other on single family homes. And lucky ducks like me who bought in 1991 had to smirk at how the values kept lurching ever-higher. Not anymore.
