Fast forward to today's real estate market

"The New York real estate market started to experience problems in the late 1980s that extended into the early 1990s," he explains. "With the exuberance the real estate markets have experienced in the past few years, people tend to forget that real estate prices actually declined in value in the early '90s. I remember units in my Upper West Side co-op building declining by about 30 to 40 percent from mid '80s peak to the early '90s trough. There was a confluence of factors that caused this depressed real estate market, including tax reforms that reversed tax policies favorable to real estate assets, oversupply that resulted from overbuilding fueled by easy money, an unprecedented wave of co-op conversions, and what eventually turned to a liquidity crisis."