Real estate is a bit different than a company whose underlying assets and future revenue expectations are 50x out of sync with stock prices. Or, I should say t

Real estate is a bit different than a company whose underlying assets and future revenue expectations are 50x out of sync with stock prices. Or, I should say that we haven't seen real estate values be that extremely overvalued. Generally speaking, if you can hold on to it, in the long term, you're fine. If you owned a $500,000 home in 2008 and it dropped to $300,000 it was meaningless unless you needed to sell your home or couldn't make the payments. You may be up $100k now, and -$100k a year from now, but if you can hold on to the property and bring in enough revenue to cover expenses like property taxes & maintenance, you'll be okay. But it could take 5 or 10 years to claw back up. The problem is that the more irrational people there are, the bigger the collapse, when it comes, the more likely you'll be to not be able to hold on to your assets (market collapse == job market collapse == liquidating assets at a loss just to survive, or satisfy bankruptcy courts)