Text size  There's so much talk about how Israeli real estate is
an island of stability in the roiling world market, that one has
to wonder whether the very complacency contains the seeds of the
next real estate bubble.  Bubbles form precisely under the
conditions of utter faith in the future: the feeling that what
was, will continue to be, and that an uptrend will stay around
forever. And when a given market stands firm in the face of a
planet-wide storm, as the local real estate market has, the
danger of complacency is all the more acute.  The proof of its
resilience could in and of itself inflate housing prices, thanks
to misplaced belief that the market is immune to jolts. And when
people think the market can only go up, they take bigger risks.
If we look at the track record of the Israeli real estate
market, we find that it did indeed weather the global economic
crisis undamaged. Last week research company Global Property
Guide published a survey showing that out of the 32 countries it
studied, 27 repor