History shows us that there are many bear markets in housing. There's also Detroit.
I sold my previous home in 2000. It recently sold for 4x what I sold it for. A great ROI, eh? If I'd invested in the S&P 500 in 2000, it went up 6.61x. And I didn't have to pay property taxes, insurance, real estate commissions, maintenance, repair vandalism, clean up after teen hookup parties, evict squatters, or any of my time.
> And I didn't have to pay property taxes, insurance, real estate commissions, maintenance, repair vandalism, clean up after teen hookup parties, evict squatters, or any of my time.
And of course, had you let it sit empty the whole time, you still would have had to pay commissions, taxes, insurance, and maintenance (because an empty home goes bad very quickly).
There are very few scenarios where the appreciation at the end would be big enough to leave you with a profit after all those expenses, especially considering financing and/or opportunity costs.
