Property values NEVER go down...

Apparently some people, even many people, really believe this. Indeed, a friend of mine said as much to me a couple years ago. "House prices always goes up." He meant even more than that, believing that house prices always rise faster than inflation. Which may be true if you take only the past ten years as evidence. Go a little further back, of course, and you see that house prices flop up and down just like anything else, sometimes very rapidly, often driven by collective waves of behavior that