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What Buffett said was true and he did lose a bundle, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway's earnings report for the second quarter of 2005. The reported loss was a billion dollars.

I live in South Florida and the speculation is ludicrous. I work as a financial planner and some of the real estate purchases down here by amateurs is over the top. My favorite one was a family with $4,000 in the bank, a 95% LTV first mortgage and not much income. They had purchased a second home as an investment in pre-construction. They told me it was a good investment, even though they were precluded from selling before construction.

They had no idea that:

A) The builder could go bankrupt or walk away with their money

B) Had to pay the mortgage, taxes and carrying costs before construction

C) That they didn't have the cash flow from their income to pay

This is far more common down here than those that claim there is no bubble want to acknowledge. This will be like the NASDAQ in 2001-02, people will be ruined and they will never believe that investing can ever be fair, that the whole game is rigged no matter what asset class they invest in.

I work as a financial planner and some of the real estate purchases down here by amateurs is over the top...

This will be like the NASDAQ in 2001-02, people will be ruined and they will never believe that investing can ever be fair, that the whole game is rigged no matter what asset class they invest in.

As a financial planner you must know that investors who remain diversified will do just fine. I am no more than an "advanced amateur" and came through 2001-02 with paper losses, but not killer ones. And we are now ahead of where we were back then. Why? Because I had put no more than 25% of my assets into tech stocks.

I doubt that RE is going to crash like NASDAQ, but all my new money has been going into the stock market for the last 3 years. And, I have been diversifying in the RE market, going from single family houses into 4-plexes in small retirement communities. No I don't expect people to retire into a unit in a 4-plex, but I do expect the people who provide services to well-off retirees to live there.