The bottom

There's a lot of bottoms being proclaimed lately and coincidently most of those proclamations are from people who are arses. Sniffing out the real estate talk around the country is a pretty simple job, bookmarking a butt-load of newspapers and visit them on a semi-regular basis to see who is spruiking. Across the last week the bottom has been proclaimed in two North Queensland markets, Cairns and Townsville. While Cairns is stinking it up, Townsville isn't completely rotten, yet has been in suspended animation for a while. But that's all over because Gold Coast property consultant, Kerrie Young, was up to speak at a business breakfast and let rip with the following...

"You are definitely in a good position to come out of this downturn. People out there waiting for it to get worse or get to the bottom, it's (already) the bottom of the market. If you are hesitating, don't, get in now."

Of course no one's going to turn up to the local branch of the Urban Development Institute for a breakfast speech and make the eggs taste rotten and the milk go sour, but with a journalist in earshot, it's pretty obvious the intended audience wasn't just the local property development goons. So how did the Townsville Bulletin write it up...

Property market waiting game over

And if you didn't get the message...

HE or she who hesitates will pay more.

Kerrie was angling for a place in the Robert Larocca hall of fame, where the biggest financial decision of anyone's life should be dictated by the speed they can move and a dose of emotional nonsense to play on the fear that housing will cost more in the future. And it goes without saying, one of the most distasteful things about such behaviour, is the fact they'll peddle this crap out of one side of their mouth, while on the other, continue to propagate the myth the real estate industry is the most over regulated in the country.

So here's something to look at - not in the slightest proof of anything - but a graph of 2006-2010, using the mention of the words "real estate near bottom," taken from Proquest ABI/Inform database, which is basically North American.

As you can see, from 2006 to 2009, the number of real estate experts (I assume the usual suspects of real estate associations, real estate economists and real estate agents) willing to proclaim the bottom grew every year. From 2006 the figure grew from 2617 mentions to 4875 in 2009. Seems to indicate the further you get away from the top, in terms of time, people become more willing to proclaim the bottom must be near. This was until 2010, which appears to be the point of realisation that people have NFI. Then begins the decline of people willing to stick their scrawny neck out, usually based on no more than a hunch or possibly some tingling in their groin.

If the bottom is in, you won't know about it till after it's happened and maybe then you won't even find out. The new bottom for the US is apparently 2012, right when the world is scheduled to end. All those potential gains swallowed by the raging fires of hell.

As Satan would say, "there's never been a better time to fry."