Real Estate Collapse Spells Havoc in Dubai

   Think back to the summer of 2007 when real estate around the world was still booming and average citizens were caught up in the hype. Goaded by cheap money, easy mortgages, and the infectious "me-too" mentality, everyone was getting into real estate. Janitors who couldn't afford it, single-income families who definitely couldn't afford it, and people like Casey Serin who eventually lost all of the houses he speculated on.

   The disease of real estate speculation also reached Dubai as an article in the Times relates today:

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/real-estate-collapse-spells-havoc-in-dubai/
On a sultry June evening in 2007, more than 100 people camped out at the offices of Emaar, a prestigious Dubai property developer, to ensure that they would land a coveted spot in a gleaming new skyscraper scheduled to open this year near the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, Liz Alderman writes in The New York Times.

Today, the property, designed by the New York architect Frank Williams (who died in February), is like a number of others around Dubai — little more than a foundation. Its value has plunged by more than 40 percent since 2008, after the collapse of Dubai’s real estate boom.

   This type of capital destruction was happening everywhere at around the same time and billions in wealth got transferred in a big way.  The speculators and buyers got swindled and bamboozled by a slick shell game that ended in 2008. If global real estate was a piece of golden farm land in 2007, it's a bombed out crater now.