I had an aunt who was a loan officer, and one day she asked when I was going to buy a house. I was 25. I told her there was no way — I couldn't afford it. She pulled out her calculator and showed me that I could. The lucky part was that no-money-down loans existed back then. So with $5,000 in the bank — exactly what the closing costs came to — I bought a house. It's probably the smartest thing I've ever done, and I more or less stumbled into it.
Two and a half years later, I sold that house for $575,000. I felt like the smartest guy in the room.
Then in 2006, I bought a duplex for $610,000. This time it didn't go the same way. To afford the higher price, I took a five-year fixed, interest-only loan. It kept my payments very low — and two years later, we all know what happened.
I actually saw the collapse coming about nine months out. I was an appraiser at the time, and the work just dried up. Meanwhile the news kept saying everything was fine. It wasn't.
Before long my house was underwater. I thought about a short sale and even listed it for a while. Then our bank offered a loan modification — they lowered the rate, pushed the extra debt to the back of the loan, and made the payments cheap. Because it was a duplex, we rented out one side, which covered most of the mortgage, and we cobbled together the rest. That's how we kept the house and stayed out of foreclosure. I was luckier than most. A lot of people lost their homes.
I saw that side of it up close. During those years I was appraising foreclosed homes for Fannie Mae. A lot of them still had people's belongings inside — they'd just left everything and moved on. It was pretty sad.
Even though we kept our home, it was still underwater. I'd bought it for $610,000, and it was worth maybe $400,000.
Around 2010, values started creeping back up. By about 2012, I was able to refinance out of that floating-rate loan into a 30-year fixed. It was the first time I felt like I was actually going to keep the house.
Fixed-rate debt is a wonderful thing. As inflation rises and everything else gets more expensive, your payment stays exactly the same. If I could give one piece of advice, it'd be to do whatever you can to get into a fixed-rate mortgage when you buy. Of course, if I'd always played it that safe, I never would have been able to buy in the first place — so sometimes you have to play a little fast and loose. Just know it's a risk.
From 2006 to 2018, that's about how long it took for the duplex to win back everything it lost and then double. In the end it turned out a lot like the first house. It just took longer.
Here's the thing. In 2026, a $610,000 duplex in Silver Lake sounds every bit as crazy as a $260,000 house did in 2002. That's what I call the real estate time machine. A lot of people who bought a long time ago have one — a story that sounds impossible now.
Who knows where the market goes from here. But I can easily picture someone today who paid two million for a Silver Lake home saying, ten years from now, "Can you believe I bought this for two million? Now they're all six."
Where people go wrong is thinking all that appreciation is real profit. I won't do the exact math — that's a little beyond my pay grade — but a lot of what you see in these stories is inflation. I've heard people estimate the actual gain is much smaller once you factor in the interest you paid, repairs, all of it. Maybe they're right.
But I like owning my home. I like fixing it the way I want and living the way I want, and not many people can tell me otherwise.
Which is a long way of getting to my real estate philosophy: Do you need a home? If yes, can you afford one? If the answer to both is yes, then it's a good time to buy.