By the way, assuming they paid off their original loan, their current monthly payment would be about $200 (assessment value of $200000). That’s the really sweet part. 
I need more money to buy more houses 
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Me too. I should spend more time working than posting on these forums.
What do you do?
Sorry don’t want to share here. Don’t know who could be reading these forums.
What if instead of buying that house, you sank in that $40k into AAPL? Well, you can’t do that in 1970. Start year is 1980:
Impressive. Except that they only invested 1/5 of that (usual down payment of 20%). So Apple shares would be worth $3M vs $2.4M for the home (plus all the saved rent). If you now do behavioral analysis, 99.99% of Apple share holders would not hold for that long, where as a decent percentage (15-20% I am guessing) of people in that area are original home owners.
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Sure. But these Cupertino homeowners are also extremely lucky. They could have bought in Oakland or Boston and their return won’t be nearly as good. Back in 1970 it’s not at all obvious that part of orchids will turn out to be a great investment almost 50 years later. Kinda like buying, and holding, AAPL.
I am sure the same people sold their Apple stocks. It’s kind of hard to hold on when Steve himself was kicked out of the company.
Now let’s turn to the future. Will Cupertino real estate have the same performance for the next 50 years? I don’t think so. Hard to see why it will.
At the same time, there is no single company that you can guarantee will see the growth of 10% a year for the next 50 years. Cupertino is more like the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ). Your risk is lower with decent returns.
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If population keeps going up in the bay area then the only way to grow is vertically (Tokyo, Hongkong style). I think Valco mall is going to be replaced by high rise buildings. Same thing at Santana Row. If land becomes scarce then I can see these properties maintain the same growth rate. If Bay area housing becomes affordable I think it will suck lot of jobs and people from the rest of the country.
At some point the housing price will become so high it makes better sense to be in another locale. Already many fresh grads hesitate to move here. We just had a story of a guy freshly out of college CS program and he had to sleep in his car to make ends meet. Houses are 3.5M a pop in Los Altos but only 350k in Pittsburg or Antioch. I know the ecosystem is strong here. But something is gotta give if the housing price differential is 20x or 100x instead of “just” 10x, which is already outrageous as is.
More than anything, extremely expensive real estate will be the thing that kills Silicon Valley.
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Nice to ser this perspective, otherwise people would cheer 20m dollar shacks, and someone claimed we would see 10m$ svl home in 202x. Sad really.
You know what? Maybe it will be Silicon Valley disrupting Silicon Valley. How about people working in a VR office that doesn’t suck? We have been talking about having a remote distributed work force forever but never really make it work. Maybe the uber high RE price will give startups incentive to make remote work work.
I am more efficient wfh when i need to code, but big part of my wotk these days is unblocking people and helping them be data driven, so we look into experiment setups, analyze data, reiterate and talk people to fix stuff or unblock people in general - this kind of stuff is hard to do virtually. I wish it wasnt.
Also with remote setup you need to solve food problem 
a minor one sure, but not having to think about food is a blessing for me. My mind is already busy as is…m
We need to simulate the high-bandwidth face-to-face physical meeting of people. I think VR has promise here. Maybe with 5G we will finally have enough bandwidth and low latency to make it work. Not as a cartoon avatar, but as a real life 3D rendering of your face at least. We will all be some sort of floating heads virtually.
5g is irrelevant when you have cable. Stop pkugging it everytime 