rebecca's pocket

» Wanting to take a truly long-term view of real estate values, a Dutch professor studied the price of real-estate transactions over four centuries on the Herengracht canal, and discovered that, adjusted for inflation, real property values rose only 0.2 percent per year. "It's true that economic and social conditions were different back then. But major crises do happen, and we can't necessarily predict them. Will bird flu be a major disaster? Will there be more hurricanes? I don't know. Nobody knows." Piet Eichholtz, a professor of real-estate finance at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. (thanks, jjg!)