Yale economist Robert Shiller won the Nobel Prize in economics in part for his work developing a nationwide index of U.S. housing prices dating back to the 1800s.
I once asked – where did he find home price data from the 1800s?
“The library,” he said, dryly.
“It’s in a book by Grabler, Blank and Winnick, a National Bureau of Research volume in the early 1950s. They had a nice analysis; wonderful book. I could recommend you read it, but nobody reads it, nobody reads it.”
There’s a well-known idea in real estate that you earn the highest ROI on the ugliest properties no one wants to own. The same is true for so many things in life: The unsexy work, where there’s little competition, is where some of the biggest ideas are found.
This story was another Morgan Housel special.
It resonated.
