Maven: No House Party

The Business Press Maven, who owns an obscenely overvalued home, wanted nothing more than for the loft in real estate prices to, uh, loft forever. Or at least until I die.

You see, while planning to take it all with me, I do understand that no crypt could fit my three-floor beauty.

But The Business Press Maven is alive and -- as always -- kicking. And the real estate party is over. If you don't believe me, just look at your favorite struggling homebuilder stock or bedraggled REIT or check the vast majority of increasingly grim housing numbers.

So where does that leave you, the investor? At high risk of being goaded into a mistake.

Let me explain. From the conglomerates of the 1960s on to the Internet of the 1990s and real estate of the current decade, overvalued markets are always justified by the business media with constant story lines about how different things are this time. Once it starts to become apparent (like now) that there is such a thing as gravity, we enter the classic second state of business media delusion. And it's potentially more dangerous.

The Business Press Maven refers to this as the "'Tis Only a Flesh Wound" stage.

Having justified the bubble for so long, the business media never simply walks away. What always comes, instead, are a series of articles about how the worst of the damage has already been done and that it's no big deal, just part of the natural course of things -- a flesh wound. Moreover, that there are safe havens amid the carnage or that there are actual bargains! The reasoning is formulaic and often heavy on buzzwords, jargon and quotes from people who have a reason to tout the lunacy back into existence.