Last year I wrote an edition dedicated to Roy Wenzlick (1894-1988). I titled him - the greatest property forecaster that lived ! You can find the edition in the Members Publications area of the website.   It was intended to educate readers on the man I give credit for discovering a U.S. wide real estate cycle that lasted on average, around 18 years.     In Wenzlick’s words, “Thirty-eight years ago, I pointed out in the Real Estate Analyst (1936) that real estate had followed

A few weeks ago the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times in London, Martin Wolf, penned an excellent article called ‘ The Case for a Land Tax is Overwhelming ’. Here’s an excerpt: ‘ I have long been a supporter of taxing land value. Such a tax would be economically efficient and morally just. But it has been politically impossible: the landowning interest, which now includes a large part of the population as owner-occupiers, has been too strong. This is a trage

In the 1880s, Judge James G Maguire of the Superior Court of the city and county of San Francisco gave a speech to the New York Anti-Poverty Society. He said: ‘I was one day walking along Kearney Street in San Francisco when I noticed a crowd in front of a show window…I took a glance myself, but I saw only a poor picture of an uninteresting landscape. Source: henrygeorge.org [Click to open in a new window] ‘ As I was turning away my eye caught these words underneath the pictu

Roy Wenzlick is possibly the greatest housing market forecaster of all time.  He did an immense amount of research on the real estate cycle and is renowned for his forecasting abilities.  However, unlike Homer Hoyt (who is credited for ‘discovering’ the 18-year boom/bust pattern as it applied to land in his 1933 book One hundred years of land values in Chicago ), Wenzlick doesn’t get a mention on Wikipedia. In fact, it’s incredibly difficult to find Wenzlick’s publicatio