Robert J. Shiller Quotes

Buying a home wouldn't make much sense if house prices were likely to decline further; no one wants to catch a falling knife.

Refurbishing I've done in the first three years and I'm still giving housing money, of course, to the north.

A major way that losses are generated in real estate ventures is through depreciation, which is supposed to reflect the way that assets lose value over time. But a well-maintained building typically gains value.

I'd like to flip houses.

The housing market has bottomed. It's not too late to get involved.

Getting into the residential investment business entails lots of renovation work.

When I bought my house in L.A., that was the best business decision I ever made, until the housing market crashed, and it became the worst business decision I ever made.

You may not like the idea of putting money into a home when you're moving out. But it's demanded by the market. You need to show it off. You don't have to rip out the kitchen and bathroom. But maybe replace the tiles or the countertops. Get professional advice.

Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it.

Besides infrastructure, there is a huge opportunity in housing and urbanisation of cities - not only building new ones, but also renewing the infrastructure of old cities to make them more livable. This provides tremendous scope for large investments to fuel growth.

I want to be a successful landlord. I like real estate.

People have lots of money in super, but they have no money in the bank, and the super funds are not built to help people buy property.

We bought property after Iniki in '92. I figured we'd never find better bargains. As it turned out, we didn't get a bargain, but we did find the spot we wanted to live on. It actually took a couple years to secure that spot. Then, after we moved, it took over 10 years to start construction on the house. It's still a work in progress.

I want to build a studio in my backyard. The interest rates are low now, so who knows.

I always say, 'What if you had to sell the house tomorrow?' And if it's too idiosyncratic, someone won't buy it and then it's a bad house.

I always felt very secure and very safe with real estate. Real estate always appreciates.

I have an expensive hobby: buying homes, redoing them, tearing them down and building them up the way they want to be built. I want to be an architect.

People should buy a house to live in, not as an investment. Property has become such a national obsession - it was the primary subject at dinner parties and how many television shows were dedicated to the market. It's not good for the economy.

The secret I've lived by ever since I started earning money is this: Always buy a house with an extra bedroom adjoining the master. And that's always my closet.

I grew up in a few houses because my dad was a builder, so we used to build and sell quite a lot.

By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.

Fifty years ago or a hundred years ago, generally, most people would buy a house the way you buy a car. When you buy a car, do you think, 'I better buy this year rather than next year because car prices might go up?'

The first house I bought was a little Spanish bungalow on Clinton Street in West Hollywood, right behind the Improv. I was renting it, and I asked the owners if I could buy it, and they were really nice and let me work out a deal. And I fixed it up and later sold it. That was when I realized that if you make some improvements, you can make money.

I tend to renovate properties when I'm not working.

Much of the blame for the Great Recession lies with abuses in the housing market - namely the creation of risky and unsustainable home loans that were packaged and sold as quality investments around the globe.