Rating: 
Summary: Hang On, It Could Be a Wild Ride
Review: In "The Coming Real Estate Bust," John Rubino lays out a sober, analytical case for why soaring real estate prices over the past decade are unsustainable. His case in a nutshell: Americans have been borrowing record sums of money through mortgages, refinancings and credit cards to maintain their lavish lifestyles. The borrowing cannot continue indefinitely. At some point, possibly as a result of a currency crisis, the supply of cheap mortgage credit will be cut off. And the credit crunch will kick the props from under the real estate markets.
Rubino marshalls abundant evidence to make his case, and he presents complex economic concepts clearly and concisely. Although I personally don't regard a catastrophic crash as inevitable -- if we're lucky, the deflation in housing prices will play out over years rather than months -- Rubino lays bare systemic imbalances in our economy that only a fool would ignore. Thoughtful readers will walk away from Rubino's book persuaded that there IS a significant risk that a real estate crash COULD occur. Investors undoubtedly will want to consider Rubino's recommendations for protecting their wealth in the event that his worst-case scenario pans out.
Rating:
Summary: Next? The New, New Crisis
Review: Like a smooth attorney summing up his case to the jury, John Rubino gives you every reason in the world to be very careful now that real estate has superseded stocks as the investment of choice. Written in June, 2003, Rubino is early. But "early" means you won't get knocked down if you head for the door.
Real estate is a much more serious bubble than stocks could ever be because not only does it involve the roof over your head, it also constitutes your biggest debt, a huge amount of employment and business activity, and enough political ramifications to cause major tremors under our political landscape in the event the author is correct. Additionally, there is no liquid market for real estate as there is for stocks. That means there is no October '87 to clean out the system in one fell swoop. Real estate busts take years to work through the system, with all the resulting hardships and recriminations that go with the bursting of a bubble.
Rubino wasn't as prescient as Robert Shiller who published "Irrational Exuberance" in the same month as NASDAQ topped out above 5000, but if real estate does crack, this time nobody can say they weren't forewarned.
The first half of the book is an excellent detailing of how the real estate market works, its history, and how the current bubble came to be. This is interesting reading for those who need to get current on the dangerous game we're playing.
The last half of the book gets more specific, giving you a good overview of the alternatives to keeping you money in real estate, including everything from lifestyle changes to tax consequences to his main concern - safety.
All in all, an excellent (and concise - 250 pages) synopsis on what more and more experts are warning is our next major crisis.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a great treatment, OK but there is a better alternative
Review: SUMMARY:
If you are just looking at this thread for the first time, and are the general "layperson" as most of us are, you might want to read the first half (125 pages) to get a relatively coherent high level discussion of the possibility a bubble exists. After you do that there are lots of web resources that have more detailed & up to date facts & arguements. It's a pretty easy read -- too easy, if anything, it does not go nearly far enough in depth for my tastes (but then again I am a systems analyst by profession). I personally think the advice about "profitting" from the bust in this book is mostly worthless, indeed possibly even dangerous, but the arguements about whether there is a bubble & how to recognize it IMO are better.
DETAILS:
The first half of the book (which another reviewer suggests you could skip -- !!!) is actually the most useful IMO. It gives a general summary of the reasons that sugggest current housing prices are unsustainable. The arguments are not very complex in construction, but I don't fault the book for it, I think it has a target audience, and that is the general public, not the subset who have a firm grasp of macroeconomics & math. My biggest gripe with this part of the book is that he expresses some facts in a misleading way, to my mathematically semi-sophisticated eye. For example, on p. 62 he has a graph of total US debt and GDP vs. a 45 year time axis. To the "untrained eye" (and he supports this impression in his text), it looks like debt is growing much faster than gdp. This impression is created by the fact that both are under $5trillion in 1957, and by 2002 gdp is $10t and debt around $34t. However, I suspect if you graphed the RATIO of debt to GDP (which is really the issue, what multiple of gdp is debt, i.e. very roughly, how many years of earnings collectively would it take to pay it off), you'll see the ratio MUCH higher at the start of the period than now, you'd probably see a decline in the graph slope for many years, then maybe an increase starting around 1985, based upon an eyeball evaluation of the two curves. That would have been a MUCH more meaningful graph, a more useful historical perspective. Maybe he thought that too abstract for his intended audience, being a derivative of the data (change over time in the rate of change of the ratio), but in this particular case I believe he has made more out of those historical numbers than is really warranted. The problem for me is, when you see that once you start to trust less all the rest of the arguments he makes, you instead find yourself wondering "what did he leave out or misrepresent this time?" But with that caveat, this is still the best overall attemtpt to make a case for a housing bubble, with the possible exception of a "Special Survey" done by the magazine Economist on 5/29/2003, which looks at the issue from an international perspective.
The last 1/2 of the book (the ostensible purpose, "how to make (or save) your money when the bubble bursts") seems even less well thought out. I'm not a professional investor, but I have been doing it a couple decades now & I came out of reading this book with very few viable (IMO) ideas on how to achieve what the title promises. For example, buying cash rich companies -- he lists msft, csco, intl, dell, nok. This advice is totally bereft of the context of stock price or p/e, and I'm sorry, a dollar is worth a dollar, and you can't say a company with cash is a good buy without even referencing how much cash you will pay for that cash!!! The suggestion of convertible bonds is also curious, I admit I have not looked at them much in my years, but my intuitive reaction is, won't these only do better than normal bonds as the stock price INCREASES (i.e. as it approaches the conversion price?), these bonds pay a lower rate & make up for that with the option to convert to shares at a fixed stock price. The value of that conversion option drops with the stock price (indeed for convertibles close to strike price, stock price changes are MAGNIFIED in the convertible pricing). So if what he suggest comes true, convertibels will be a WORSE buy than plain old bonds, overall. (maybe he suggests convertibles just as a safer alternative to stocks, and not necessarily better to buy than plain old bonds? If that's waht he meant he should have SAID it though). And regarding gold pricing -- I actually have one raw gold producer that he mentions on my watch list right now, they are a major player in many other metals markets as well (copper, silver, etc). Having that POV, I can tell you that he has totally ignored the whole question of decreased industrial demand that would come with the kind of financial catastrophe he envisions, very relevant given the exposure this particular stock has to these other metal productions. Heck that is the reason that I am still on the sidelines, reduction of demand in China (which is creeping up in the news more in recent weeks as they attempt to engineer a "soft landing" to a badly overheated economy) could totally take the floor out from underneath a lot of these raw maerial producing companies.
Finally, while by no means suggesting this is a fair way to evaluate his advice in this second half of the book -- since the whole argument is predicated on the collapse of the housing market, which has not (yet) happened -- it should be noted that a quick review of many of his suggested strategies shows that anyone following his advice in the one year approx since he finished writing it (he mentions this being the beginning of June 2003) would have vastly underperformed the market, or even lost money, in the interim.
So, in short, I find the first half the book (is there a bubble, why) a pretty good introduction to the argument for it, not perfect, but perhaps the best one out there. I find the other half (what will happen to the economy when it bursts, how to profit/protect yourself from it) very much unsatisfying, and I am stuck where I started, thinking "I think there is a serious risk here" but still unable to figur out how to translate this concern into concrete action for my own personal finances.
*** UPDATE 9/12/04: Since writing this review on 5/2/04, I have found and read John Talbott's book from 2003 on the same subject,
"The Coming Crash in the Housing Market : 10 Things You Can Do Now to Protect Your Most Valuable Investment." Having read that, I have changed the title of the review, & I would now change my statement in my review above that this book is 'perhaps the best introduction to the argument for a housing bubble out there.' I now believe the Talbott book is better, the statistics in that book are more carefully and rigourously presented, and do not seem to suffer from the misleading presentations you see in this book. In other words, although both books make essentially the same arguement, the Talbott book makes it more completely & convincingly.
Rating:
Summary: Not a great treatment, but there isn't much alternative
Review: SUMMARY:If you are just looking at this thread for the first time, and are the general "layperson" most of us are, I suggest you might want to read the first half (125 pages) to get a relatively complete and coherent high level discussion of the possibility a bubble exists. After you do that there are lots of web resources that have more detailed & up to date facts & arguements. It's a pretty easy read -- too easy, if anything, it does not go nearly far enough in depth for my tastes (but then again I am a systems analyst by profession). I personally think this book is mostly worthless, indeed possibly even dangerous in its advice, for the purposes the title claims (how to make money on the bubble popping), but the description of the arguments to for trying to do so are a bit better. DETAILS: The first half of the book (which another reviewer suggests you could skip -- !!!) is actually the most useful IMO. It gives a general summary of the reasons that sugggest current housing prices are unsustainable. The arguments are not very complexly constructed, but I don't fault the book for it, I think it has a target audience, and that is the general public, not the subset who have a firm grasp of macroeconomics & math. My biggest gripe with this part of the book is that he expresses some facts in a misleading way, to my mathematically semi-sophisticated eye. For example, on p. 62 he has a graph of total US debt and GDP vs. a 45 year time axis. To the "untrained eye" (and he supports this impression in his text), it looks like debt is growing much faster than gdp. This impression is created by the fact that both are under $5trillion in 1957, and by 2002 gdp is $10t and debt around $34t. However, I suspect if you graphed the RATIO of debt to GDP (which is really the issue, what multiple of gdp is debt, i.e. very roughly, how many years of earnings collectively would it take to pay off collctive debt), you will see the ratio MUCH higher at the start of the period than now, you'd probably see a decline in the graph slope for many years, then maybe an increase starting around 1985, based upon an eyeball evaluation of the two curves. That would have been a MUCH more meaningful graph, a more useful historical perspective. Maybe he thought that too abstract for his intended audience, being a derivative of the data (change over time in the rate of change of the ratio), but in this particular case I believe he has made more out of those historical numbers than is really warranted. The problem for me is, when you see that once, you start to trust less all the rest of the arguments he makes, you instead find yourself wondering "what did he leave out or misrepresent this time?" But with that caveat, I repeat that this is still the best overall attemtpt to make a case for a housing bubble, with the possible exception of a "Special Survey" done by the magazine Economist on 5/29/2003, which looks at the issue from an international perspective. The last 1/2 of the book (the ostensible purpose, "how to make (or save) your money when the bubble bursts") seems even less well thought out. I'm not a professional investor, but I have been doing it a couple decades now & I came out of reading this book with very few viable (IMO) ideas on how to achieve what the title promises. For example, buying cash rich companies -- he lists msft, csco, intl, dell, nok. This advice is totally bereft of the context of stock price or p/e, and I'm sorry, a dollar is worth a dollar, and you can't say a company with cash is a good buy without even referencing how much cash you will pay for that cash!!! the suggestion of convertible bonds is also curious, I admit I have not looked at them much in my years, but my intuitive reaction is, won't these only do better than normal bonds as the stock price INCREASES (i.e. as it approaches the conversion price?) these bonds pay a lower rate & make up for that with the option to convert to shares at a fixed stock price. The value of that conversion option drops with the stock price (indeed for convertibles close to strike price, stock price changes are MAGNIFIED in the convertible pricing). And regarding gold pricing -- I actually have one raw gold producer that he mentions on my watch list right now, they are a major player in many other metals markets as well (copper, silver, etc). Having that POV, I can tell you that he has totally ignored the whole question of decreased industrial demand that would come with the kind of financial catastrophe he envisions, very relevant given the exposure this particular stock has to these other metal productions. Heck that is the reason that I am still on the sidelines, reduction of demand in china (which is creeping up in the news more in recent weeks as they attempt to engineer a "soft landing" to a badly overheated economy) could totally take the floor out from underneath a lot of these companies. Finally, while by no means suggesting this is a fair way to evaluate his advice in this second half of the book -- since the whole argument is predicated on the collapse of the housing market, which has not (yet) happened -- it should be noted that a quick review of many of his suggested strategies shows that anyone following his advice in the one year approx since he finished writing it (he mentions this being the beginning of June 2003) would have vastly underperformed the market, or even lost money, in the interim. So, in short, I find the first half the book (is there a bubble, why) a pretty good introduction to the argument for it, not perfect, but perhaps the best one out there. I find the other half (what will happen to the economy when it bursts, how to profit/protect yourself from it) very much unsatisfying, and I am stuck where I started, thinking "I think there is a serious risk here" but still unable to figur out how to translate this concern into concrete action for my own personal finances.
Rating:
Summary: Not a great treatment, but there isn't much alternative
Review: SUMMARY: If you are just looking at this thread for the first time, and are the general "layperson" most of us are, I suggest you might want to read the first half (125 pages) to get a relatively complete and coherent high level discussion of the possibility a bubble exists. After you do that there are lots of web resources that have more detailed & up to date facts & arguements. It's a pretty easy read -- too easy, if anything, it does not go nearly far enough in depth for my tastes (but then again I am a systems analyst by profession). I personally think this book is mostly worthless, indeed possibly even dangerous in its advice, for the purposes the title claims (how to make money on the bubble popping), but the description of the arguments to for trying to do so are a bit better. DETAILS: The first half of the book (which another reviewer suggests you could skip -- !!!) is actually the most useful IMO. It gives a general summary of the reasons that sugggest current housing prices are unsustainable. The arguments are not very complexly constructed, but I don't fault the book for it, I think it has a target audience, and that is the general public, not the subset who have a firm grasp of macroeconomics & math. My biggest gripe with this part of the book is that he expresses some facts in a misleading way, to my mathematically semi-sophisticated eye. For example, on p. 62 he has a graph of total US debt and GDP vs. a 45 year time axis. To the "untrained eye" (and he supports this impression in his text), it looks like debt is growing much faster than gdp. This impression is created by the fact that both are under $5trillion in 1957, and by 2002 gdp is $10t and debt around $34t. However, I suspect if you graphed the RATIO of debt to GDP (which is really the issue, what multiple of gdp is debt, i.e. very roughly, how many years of earnings collectively would it take to pay off collctive debt), you will see the ratio MUCH higher at the start of the period than now, you'd probably see a decline in the graph slope for many years, then maybe an increase starting around 1985, based upon an eyeball evaluation of the two curves. That would have been a MUCH more meaningful graph, a more useful historical perspective. Maybe he thought that too abstract for his intended audience, being a derivative of the data (change over time in the rate of change of the ratio), but in this particular case I believe he has made more out of those historical numbers than is really warranted. The problem for me is, when you see that once, you start to trust less all the rest of the arguments he makes, you instead find yourself wondering "what did he leave out or misrepresent this time?" But with that caveat, I repeat that this is still the best overall attemtpt to make a case for a housing bubble, with the possible exception of a "Special Survey" done by the magazine Economist on 5/29/2003, which looks at the issue from an international perspective. The last 1/2 of the book (the ostensible purpose, "how to make (or save) your money when the bubble bursts") seems even less well thought out. I'm not a professional investor, but I have been doing it a couple decades now & I came out of reading this book with very few viable (IMO) ideas on how to achieve what the title promises. For example, buying cash rich companies -- he lists msft, csco, intl, dell, nok. This advice is totally bereft of the context of stock price or p/e, and I'm sorry, a dollar is worth a dollar, and you can't say a company with cash is a good buy without even referencing how much cash you will pay for that cash!!! the suggestion of convertible bonds is also curious, I admit I have not looked at them much in my years, but my intuitive reaction is, won't these only do better than normal bonds as the stock price INCREASES (i.e. as it approaches the conversion price?) these bonds pay a lower rate & make up for that with the option to convert to shares at a fixed stock price. The value of that conversion option drops with the stock price (indeed for convertibles close to strike price, stock price changes are MAGNIFIED in the convertible pricing). And regarding gold pricing -- I actually have one raw gold producer that he mentions on my watch list right now, they are a major player in many other metals markets as well (copper, silver, etc). Having that POV, I can tell you that he has totally ignored the whole question of decreased industrial demand that would come with the kind of financial catastrophe he envisions, very relevant given the exposure this particular stock has to these other metal productions. Heck that is the reason that I am still on the sidelines, reduction of demand in china (which is creeping up in the news more in recent weeks as they attempt to engineer a "soft landing" to a badly overheated economy) could totally take the floor out from underneath a lot of these companies. Finally, while by no means suggesting this is a fair way to evaluate his advice in this second half of the book -- since the whole argument is predicated on the collapse of the housing market, which has not (yet) happened -- it should be noted that a quick review of many of his suggested strategies shows that anyone following his advice in the one year approx since he finished writing it (he mentions this being the beginning of June 2003) would have vastly underperformed the market, or even lost money, in the interim. So, in short, I find the first half the book (is there a bubble, why) a pretty good introduction to the argument for it, not perfect, but perhaps the best one out there. I find the other half (what will happen to the economy when it bursts, how to profit/protect yourself from it) very much unsatisfying, and I am stuck where I started, thinking "I think there is a serious risk here" but still unable to figur out how to translate this concern into concrete action for my own personal finances.
Rating: 
Summary: Does a bubble really exist?
Review: The main problem with this book is that the author believes the housing market will crash and so therefore it is not an objective look at the residential real estate market. As a result, I did not find it helpful. I live in Southern California. The housing market crashed in the early 1990s not because of interest rates or overbuilding but because of a severe recession. The California economy was still in recession while the rest of the country improved. This drove many people out of the state, which of course led to more supply of housing than demand. Housing dropped approximately 40%. However, anyone who held onto their home made that 40% and more back in less than a decade. A previous reviewer claimed that San Diego's population and housing have increased at the same rate, yet there has been a 110% increase in prices. This simply is not possible. Housing is based on supply and demand. Housing simply won't go up in value if there is little or no demand. It is estimated that only 80% of the necessary housing is being built to accommodate the large numbers of people moving into Southern California. For every 3 jobs created in Orange County, California only one housing unit is built. This has driven many OC workers into homes in surrounding areas like Long Beach and Riverside, which has driven prices up in these areas. Many building companies are wary of overbuilding so they are constraining supply. Local governments make more money from commercial real estate, so they have had strong incentives to provide more permits for commercial rather than residential real estate, which has contributed to current housing shortages. An increase in interest rates may temporarily dampen the housing market but as more people enter the rental markets already sky-high rents will go higher driving even more people back into the housing market. I don't see any decline in Southern California housing for a long time. As a result, I don't believe that there will be a housing bust anytime soon to benefit from. Real estate is local, so you can't judge what may happen in Illinois based on what is happening in Arkansas, which is why I am only discussing my local market. The rule of thumb is that housing increases an average of 6% a year. Some housing markets can go into decline and remain in decline for years. However, these are generally areas that are/were dependent on one industry or one company as an employer. This book is interesting in many respects but I don't feel that his premise applies where I live.
Rating:
Summary: Good Gold Advice
Review: The most interesting part of this book isn't directly
about real estate. It's where Rubino explains how the
trade deficit will weaken the dollar, which will make
gold a better investment than stocks or cash. This
strikes me as very logical, and the chapter on gold
here is both well written and useful. It walks readers
through the reasons gold is going to surge (it's doing
that already, in case you haven't noticed) and the
different ways of buying and owning it, like gold
coins, stocks and mutual funds. I chose gold coins and
called the dealers listed in the chapter for quotes.
You still have to do some homework, but this is a
great starting point.
Rating:
Summary: Semi-Convincing
Review: The views in this book are one-sided and no counterarguments are made. The author successfully makes a convincing, although less than airtight, argument that there is a housing bubble, and it will burst while dragging the economy with it. If you want to understand the relationship between housing prices, financial markets, and the economy, then this is a great book to read. If you want find a balanced view of the future housing market trends, then this book is less than satisfying.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect Timing
Review: The whole "How to Profit" thing is a little overdone
these days, but this book's timing is good enough to
make up for the unoriginal title. Here in California,
real estate is clearly a bubble, and Rubino does a
good job of laying out the causes and consequences.
Then he fits the housing bubble into the big picture
which, if he's right, is absolutely terrifying. In a
nutshell, we've been borrowing like crazy for the past
twenty years, and now we're eating our home equity.
Pretty soon we'll run out of wiggle room and the whole
system will crumble. People who borrowed to the max on
overvalued houses will go bankrupt and the companies
that are inflating the housing bubble will crash. And
the east and west coasts, where home prices are
highest, will have the hardest time. All things
considered, it's a tightly-reasoned, well-written,
very scary argument. One tip for readers: You can skip the "Housing
history" section (it's interesting but not necessary
to understanding today's housing bubble) and go
straight to the second section, where Rubino explains
how the housing bubble happened and why it's going to
pop.
Rating: 
Summary: Doom & Gloom
Review: This is just another doom and gloom book designed to scare you into buying it. The author forgets about the basic law of supply and demand and what drives prices - scarcity. And there is strong demand and little supply of housing in San Diego and other popular West Coast cities. Further, the author ignores the projections of increasing population for California which will keep real estate prices high. Values won't keep going up forever, but they're not going to crash either. The "Golden State" is still golden and everyone wants to live here.
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