I find this BEYOND disturbing! Has nobody noticed that there's all these homeless PEOPLE in our country? Come on! These "intellectuals" are getting paid good money to design houses for bubbles? What's next, beds for feathers?

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

This guy is on the money. I think Australia is in full bubble mode as well, but probably about 12 months behind the US.

It's a scam that needs some greed culling. My brother's house was bought for 80k 7 years ago and now is worth 180k, and rent here went from 350 a month for a duplex to 500 for a studio in the same amount of time. New families can't even buy a starter home without borrowing from their parents anymore. "Market value" means shit, if they really went by what the real market can afford, prices would be half of what they are.

Now we have more trailer parks and barrio complexes doubling in size and a lot of larger homes being bought and sold without people ever moving into them.

Impress me, show me some somnoluminescent housing bubbles...

The GTA is not being affected by the bubble, due to our anomalous condo market.

Humboldt has a list of links related to the housing bubble (http://www.humboldt.edu/~indexhum/realestate/), including opinions by economists that disagree that housing bubble even exists (http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2005/06/what_is_a_bubbl.html)

"Economists would say there's a bubble in the market if home buyers are basing their expectation about the price that they can sell the house for in the future on something other than the affordability and desirability of that home to the future buyer"

This definition is not precise, but it captures the essence -- in market bubble, the prices have to be higher than what can be explained by market fundamentals. The analysis of the last link shows that in a simple" buy house today, sell 1 year later" model, a rational house price is rent/(interest rate - rent growth rate). In 2005, rents grew fast enough in California to explain the high prices under that model. Another link from that website showed median housing prices falling since 2006.