Everybody has their Waterloo, everybody and Gary is no exception.  If you know him he will joke about the whole thing.  What I can say is that he was right for many years when everybody else was pointing to a disaster and the fundmentals in the RE market in the OC are still strong.

Its easy to kick a guy when he is down, or pile on like everybody else, but one thing I can promise you is that sooner or later we all suffer defeat.  That is if you live long enough.

Of course all this is just my opinion.

GW was right when pretty much everybody was "right". His advice rose to the top of the pile because of word of mouth, not so much by the substance of the data. I've got his forecasts going back to the early 2000's and it isn't a great read in hindsight. At least GW was no David Lerah or L. Yun.

To GW's credit he has "Mea-Culpa'd" quite a bit recently and has been far more reasonable in looking at the reality of the RE market and not just the hope contained therein. Perhaps this perspective shift was due to his own difficulties with his investment properties...like the Real Houswives of OC some of whom made their wealth during the RE upswing, but now are being evicted, short-sale'd or foreclosed upon with uncanny regularity. They were right on the way up, and did not get out of the way fast enough on the way down.

Thanks for reading,

fundamentals are awful right now. Yes, It is fun to kick someone who has a myopic single minded view and has been shown as a fraud.   He is a realtor who  positioned himself as a economist which is a great marketing job.  I highly doubt he is laughing today but I can guarantee you he thinks prices will be higher at this time next year. He  didn't have to be wrong he just needed to take a look at reality but continued to pitch ever higher prices to keep selling.  Kind of like you saying fundamentals are great.  

I disagree with your statement that Gary was right when pretty much everybody was right.  UCLA, Chaptman and many others all year after year forecast a declining real estate market, time and time again and again.  Gary was marching to a different drum beat then but was always quick to warn about the unemployment rate.  Yes employment is a derivative of the economy as a whole but his biggest concern was always unemployment and how that could significantly change the real estate picture as was the case in the 90's with the defense industry and the OC, star wars, and all that other stuff that went south as a by-product of the end of the cold war.

I followed this fairly closely and the big universities were consistently wrong.  But then Gary is down and out, blood is in the water so have a kick and another kick.

In the words of the Great Marcus Aurelius, "And this too shall pass".

As everything does in life.

Of course all this is just my opinion.

GW's brief swim against the tide happened some time ago when as you correctly note, he spoke about the employment picture and Real Estate trends.

Anything you read from GW yr 2000 forward has a stink of foolishness on every page. It's pretty easy to nail him hard using 20/20 hindsight, but jeez, read some of the GW missives from 2000 to 2007 and you'll need an insulin shot to wake you from your kool-aid induced coma.

GW's terrible stuff that was masquerading as analysis had been absorbed without question by the 1000's of freshly minted Donald Trumps with their shiny new Real Estate Sales licenses who then in turn influenced poorly informed people into making decisions that really do require a great deal of thought. GW wasn't a singular direct cause for the bad choices people made in the boom times, but GW's cheerleading from a base of ignorance was certainly a significant factor.

Thanks for reading,

LoansbyJW 

Being wrong meant they were early.  As always in investing being early is far less troublesome than being too late. 

In hindsight its pretty easy to see that early means they were being rational in the face of an irrational market.  I guess you could say they were right it just took fools like Gary a while to catch up to reality.  I guess the university types you mention just weren't hip enough to know about option arms and the ability of mortgage originators to fund ever more creative methods of prolonging and expanding the bubble. 

I'll take their early forecast (and I did) over Gary's buy until it blows up mantra any day.  I just feel for the folks with good jobs and good credit who relied on fools brimming with GW information for their "expertise" in real estate and bought far more than they should have.  All the energy and initiatives to save the folks at the lower end of the scale will be used up by the time the middle class have blown through their savings, and 401k's trying to save their house.  

LoansbyJW,

I disagree that GW's analysis stinks of foolishness.  At the time he was right on the money.  His last two years he blew it, but so did many of us.  Hindsight is 20/20 as we all know.  Gary was very much pro real estate and he loved Orange County.  The OC had, and still has a lot of +'s, though many on this board seem to disagree.

But what do I know, just an old guy on the back 9 of his life trying to survive.  Blood is in the water, take your bite.

Of course all this is just my opinion.