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> In short, trust none of them To amplify: I don't think it's any accident that the 2005 housing fiasco happened in this industry. Terrible pricing informati

• zo1 11y ago
  >"make me wonder how much longer these dinosaurs are going to continue to operate the same way." As long as the regulations are in place that protect them from market competition and innovation.
• _delirium 11y ago
  Do you mean the 2007-08 housing crash, or something else in 2005? If the 2008 one, it had a lot more to do with the financial side than the actual real-estate side, so changes in the real-estate sales process aren't likely to fix that problem. The "primary" dollar value involved in housing-price declines was significant but not really enough to cause an economy-destabilizing financial crisis. But the primary price declines in actual real-estate were multiplied many times over because the mortgages were all piled into heavily leveraged securities, priced based on risk models that turned out to be very inaccurate. That caused a crisis that ultimately involved dollar amounts greater than the total value of all the involved real estate. A loose analogy: if you buy stock with 100:1 leverage, and the stock price declines 10%, you lose 1000% of your original investment. The big problem here wasn't really the 10% decline in stock values (significant but not catastrophic), rather the fact that you had 100:1 leveraged exposure.
• Simulacra 11y ago
  Very good point.