America in miniature

Bloomberg Businessweek got a fair bit of (justified, IMO) guff for this magazine cover on the recent real estate comeback. But what I found even more noteworthy was this little anecdote in the cover article:

LaVanway, like so many in Phoenix, has her own story of the ups, the downs, the upside downs, and the recovery. “We wrote contracts on the hoods of our cars,” she says of the heady times. By the spring of 2007 “you couldn’t run fast enough, you couldn’t chase the market down, it was like trying to outrun a tsunami,” she says. 

LaVanway, now 52, got caught, too. A former mechanical engineer, she received her real estate license in 2005 and planned to flip homes with her husband, a subcontractor. 

If you look at her LinkedIn profile, she worked in the aerospace industry as an engineer, went into software and then finally into real estate. Emblematic of the aughts, for sure.