Three trends that may indicate the beginning of kingdom breakthrough.
“Who’s ever lost money investing in real estate?”
This was the single question that stood as the foundation of many people’s ‘all-in’ attitude for real estate investing in the early 2000s. My wife and I were certainly all-in, cashing out all other forms of investments to buy multiple homes.
For some years, it seemed like a no-brainer. Every deal followed a predictable pattern—I made money when I bought the house, I made money as I rented the house, and I made a lot of money when I sold the house.
Before the housing crash that marked the beginning of the Great Recession, most of us investing in real estate knew disruption coming—we just thought we had years to prepare for it.
Little did we know that the world was about to change quickly. The writing was on the wall—whispers of credit default swaps, bundled toxic assets, unsustainable growth patterns in homes…only fools believed things would go on as they were before, but disruption came quickly and when it did, there was no escape.
There is much to learn about the spiritual condition of America from the days leading up to the Great Recession. As a person who loves big data, I want to believe that we can interpret the future based solely upon data points available to us now, but this assumption is very much like the question “Who’s ever lost money investing in real estate?”
As a person who literally lost almost everything in the market crash, I’ve grown suspicious of what we can learn merely from data. There are variables, disruptive and life changing, variables that can quickly crush our trend analysis and usher in a new normal in the blink of an eye. I believe that we should always hold our data …