Real Estate Investor Magazine South Africa May 2018 | Page 54

INSIGHT Why I still Like Property Despite the ever-changing landscape INVEST IN REAL ESTATE IN THE UNITED STATES BY DR DOLF DE ROOS W e live in changing times. Bob Dylan wrote The Times They are a-Changin in the 1960s, and ever since then, the rate of change has only accelerated. Countless cli- chés point to the same conclusion. Teenagers today don’t know a world without smartphones, but those in their 20s remember feature phones, and those in their 30s remember flip phones, while those in their 40s remember some of the original analog mobile cellphones such as the large Motorola ‘brick’. Of course, those even older remember a time before we had mobile phones – a world of airplane passengers disembarking and running to the ubiquitous pay phones to call (in exchange for some coins, of course) head office and get updates on any ap- pointments for the day. Those who have been around for a while will remember a slew of investment phases and crazes that people have gone through. From ostrich farming (a sure winner!) to fax machines (one day, everyone will have one!) and from Personal Digital Assistants (such as the coveted Palm Pilot) to Beanie Babies. While crazes such as Beanie Babies, Hula Hoops and collect- ing oddly shaped paper clips can be reasonably predicted to die a natural death, who would have thought that a company such as Kodak, totally dominant in its field of photography for over a century, to the extent that “a Kodak moment” entered into com- mon lexicon, would suddenly find itself the dominant player in an industry (film) that would collapse around it, resulting in the company’s bankruptcy? While many young people will, with the benefit of hindsight, claim that Kodak’s demise was inevitable, few young, technologi- cally savvy investors predicted that Nokia, until recently the larg- est manufacturer of cell phones, would disappear off the face of the earth within a few years. Nor did they predict the demise of the Blackberry, or maps, or landlines, or phone books, or CDs, or movie rental stores. Indeed, there are many more people who can eloquently and accurately explain to me why a company or industry died, than there are people who can accurately predict which companies will die in the near future. Which brings me to my point: whether it was by tremendous brilliance and foresight or merely luck that I latched onto an in- dustry at the age of 17 that has stood the test of time. I am ever grateful that my energy – and capital – was diverted into property which is still chugging along very nicely. The property question To be sure, the industry has changed a lot. The way we buy and sell properties (on