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People have been predicting the housing bubble would break forever. Some many times in fact that even a broken clock was correct more often. From the Boston Globe come the following article, ‘It’s a bubble. So what? Bubble? Maybe. Trouble? Maybe not’.

Ted Duncan remembers how his first clients walked away from the real estate market. ”They told me prices were too high and ready to crash,” says Duncan, an agent with RE/MAX Select Realty in Allston. That was 1999. Since then, prices in his neighborhood have more than doubled, increasing an average of nearly 14 percent a year.

There are always reasons to worry, but there are measures that one can take.

Should we worry? That depends, says Karl Case, an economics professor at Wellesley College. ”If I were shelling out $1 million to buy a cottage in a little back alley in the suburbs, I would be nervous,” he says, noting that a 15 percent to 20 percent decline could sink that buyer. Ditto for the highly leveraged buyer using lots of debt to finance a big new home or the investor looking for a quick killing.

But buyers who build the necessary shock absorbers into their new home purchases can make their real estate ride much smoother. A new three-bedroom home may indeed lose value if the market tanks, but so will the four-bedroom home that you eventually hope to move up to. That means if you choose a property that’s likely to be attractive to future buyers, prepare to stay put for five or more years, and avoid risky mortgages, the market jolts may leave you unscathed.

Read the entire article for some tips on heading off the pain that any bubble could cause.

Related posts:

1. Boston Housing Bubble Bursting? And is that bad?
2. The New York Times Talks About What a Real Estate Bubble is (or isn’t)
3. Three Things to Know About the Housing Bubble
4. A Bubble Bloggers Round Up
5. Boston Real Estate Market Slows