David Lereah was the chief economist for that National Association of Realtors before he left to become an Executive Vice President of Move, INC. During his tenure as chief economist, he published several books. One of them, released in 2005, was titled Are You Missing The Real Estate Boom? Why Home Values And Other Real Estate Investments Will Climb Through The End Of The Decade—And How To Profit From Them. The cover depicted a nice enough looking family staring up at tiny little house that was hovering in the sky above their heads, out of reach, but still tantalizingly close. If only, if only they’d just read Mr. Lereah’s book!

According to Lereah, home owners who pay off their mortgages are bad at managing their money and are “very unsophisticated.” He told the LA Times in 2005,

“If you paid your mortgage off, it means you probably did not manage your funds efficiently over the years,” said David Lereah, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors and author of “Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?” “It’s as if you had 500,000 dollar bills stuffed in your mattress.”

When suspicions began to arise that residential real estate was experiencing unsustainable growth and that a correction was inevitable (and disastrous, considering the amount of mortgages that were financed with the assumption that the home owners could sell the house at a substantial profit in only a few years), Mr. Lereah’s book was retitled. The new title read Why The Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust—And How You Can Profit From It . That was February of 2006. We think enough time has passed without a title update.

What should Mr. Lereah’s book be called now?

Home Equity at Risk [LA Times]
David Lereah [Wikipedia]

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