Shiller uncovered another key piece of evidence for the bubble: the people buying the homes had completely unrealistic assumptions about what their investments might return. A survey commissioned by Case and Schiller in 2003 found that homeowners expected their properties to appreciate at a rate of about 13 percent per year.56 In practice, over that one-hundred-year period from 1896 through 199657 to which I referred earlier, sale prices of houses had increased by just 6 percent total after inflation, or about 0.06 percent annually.
