Roy Wenzlick

Overview

Roy Willis Wenzlick (June 13, 1894 – 1988) was an American real-estate appraiser, publisher, and economic forecaster based in St. Louis, Missouri.[1][2] Trained in his father Albert Wenzlick's St. Louis real-estate firm and holding a Ph.D. in economics from Saint Louis University (1942), he founded the Roy Wenzlick Research Corporation in 1928 and, in 1932, began publishing The Real Estate Analyst — described by the State Historical Society of Missouri, which holds his papers (including "a complete run of Wenzlick's newsletter, 'The Real Estate Analyst'"), as "the only national statistical forecasting service on real estate" at the time of its founding.[1][3] The newsletter's existence and its 1932 launch are independently corroborated by the Internet Archive's digitized run of The Real Estate Analyst, whose earliest volumes carry a volume-numbering consistent with a 1932 first year (Vol. 3 is dated 1934), running continuously through the 1930s–1960s.[8] His firm went on to complete more than 475,000 appraisals and over 60 major redevelopment reports across the United States before his 1974 retirement.[3]

The 1936 Forecast and the 18-Year Cycle

Wenzlick is significant to this wiki chiefly for reaching, independently of Homer Hoyt's 1933 Chicago dissertation, a similar conclusion: that U.S. real-estate values move in a recurring cycle of roughly 18 years. Where Hoyt's evidence was drawn from a single city (Chicago) across a century, Wenzlick's own charting reportedly drew on data assembled from more than 120 U.S. cities, extending his original St. Louis case-history work outward.[4] His 1936 pamphlet-format book, The Coming Boom in Real Estate and What to Do About It (Simon & Schuster), charted U.S. real-estate booms and depressions back to the Civil War and, according to a contemporary Time magazine review, identified "only four great depressions" in St. Louis real estate since the war — one in 1873–75, one following an 1890 peak, one during World War I after a 13-year decline, and one beginning in 1925 — and predicted a coming boom would crest "probably not until 1943 or 1944," with commercial-building activity marking the final stage before the downturn.[5] The book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first year and appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.[3][4] The 1943–44 peak call is widely reported by later cycle writers as having been borne out by the postwar real-estate boom, with Wenzlick further forecasting — and later writers crediting him with correctly anticipating — a subsequent cyclical low around 1955.[4]The 1955 low forecast and the "120+ cities" figure are reported consistently across secondary/practitioner sources (Anderson 2008; Fat Tail Daily), but this page has not independently examined Wenzlick's primary 1936 or subsequent Real Estate Analyst text to confirm the exact figures and dates.

In later writing, Wenzlick himself described refining the cycle length: "Thirty-eight years ago, I pointed out... that real estate had followed a long cycle which I later determined to average 18 1/3 years... Some were slightly longer, and some were shorter."[4]

Place in the Land-Cycle Lineage

Wenzlick's independent 18-year finding is cited by later Georgist-adjacent cycle writers as corroboration of Hoyt's Chicago data — evidence that the pattern was not an artifact of one city's history. Phillip J. Anderson's The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking (2008) draws on Wenzlick's real-estate transfer indices alongside Hoyt's Chicago data and Fred Harrison's cycle work as part of its evidentiary base, and Akhil Patel's The Secret Wealth Advantage (2023) likewise places Wenzlick in the lineage running from Hoyt through Harrison, Anderson, and Patel himself.[6][7] Wenzlick was not a Georgist and, unlike Fred Harrison or Anderson, did not frame his forecasting work as an argument for land value taxation; his relevance here, as with Hoyt, is as an independent empirical source for the claim that a recurring land/real-estate cycle exists, not as evidence about what — if anything — would dampen it.[6]

Wenzlick has no Wikipedia page and his extensive body of publications (spanning the 1930s to his 1974 retirement) is not widely available online; most of what is documented about him circulates through practitioner/investment-newsletter writing on the 18-year cycle rather than academic real-estate history, so claims above outside the State Historical Society of Missouri's archival description and the contemporary 1936 Time review should be read with that caveat.[4]

See Also

• Homer Hoyt — independently produced the Chicago data forming the other empirical pillar of the land-cycle lineage
• 18-Year Land Cycle — the pattern Wenzlick's multi-city data corroborated
• Phillip J. Anderson — cites Wenzlick's real-estate transfer indices in his 2008 book
• Akhil Patel — places Wenzlick in the Hoyt-to-Patel forecasting lineage
• Boom-Bust Cycle — the general concept Wenzlick's forecasting work bears on
• Progress and the 18.6-Year Cycle — this wiki's research page on the popularized lineage narrative

Sources

1. "Roy Wenzlick Papers, 1882–1981 (S0574)," State Historical Society of Missouri, Saint Louis Manuscript Collections, accessed 2026-07-11. SHSMO collection record — used for confirmation that Wenzlick was "a prominent real estate analyst, appraiser, author, and publisher," that his 1936 book made the New York Times bestseller list, and for the existence of his complete Real Estate Analyst newsletter run in the archive; this is the strongest institutional/archival source found in this research pass.
2. "A Boom is Coming, According to the Greatest Property Market Forecaster that Lived," Fat Tail Daily (Catherine Cashmore), 24 March 2023. Fat Tail Daily — used for birth/death years (1894–1988), the founding of Albert Wenzlick Real Estate (his father's firm), the 1928 founding of the Roy Wenzlick Research Corporation, the 1932 launch of The Real Estate Analyst, the Ph.D. from Saint Louis University (1942), and the 475,000-appraisals/60-reports figures (there attributed to the State Historical Society of Missouri). Author is an investment-newsletter publisher and Georgist-adjacent cycle advocate (former president of Prosper Australia), not an academic historian; claims are corroborated where possible against the SHSMO archival page but should be read as practitioner secondary literature.An independent academic biography of Wenzlick was not located in this research pass.
3. "Roy Wenzlick Papers," State Historical Society of Missouri collection description (see source 1) — used for the "only national statistical forecasting service" characterization and the appraisals/reports figures, cross-checked against source 2.
4. Fat Tail Daily (source 2, continued) and "The Land Cycle Secret," Land Cycle Investor (Catherine Cashmore). Land Cycle Investor — used for the "120+ cities" claim, the 1943–44 peak / 1955 low forecast, and the direct Wenzlick quotation on the 18⅓-year average cycle (quotation under 50 words). Both are the same practitioner-advocate's writing; treat as a single source lineage rather than two independent corroborations.Primary-source confirmation of the exact "120+ cities" figure directly from Wenzlick's own publications remains outstanding.
5. Unsigned, "Pamphlet Boom," Time magazine, 25 May 1936, reprinted at Cooperative Individualism (Schalkenbach-affiliated archive). Cooperative Individualism — a contemporary (1936) press source; used for the St. Louis four-depressions case history (1873–75, post-1890, WWI-era, post-1925), the "probably not until 1943 or 1944" quotation (under 50 words), and biographical details (birth "40 years ago" i.e. c.1896, career at the Post-Dispatch, joining his father's firm in 1929, founding Real Estate Analysts, Inc.). The age-at-1936 figure in this source is not perfectly consistent with the 1894 birth year given by sources 1–2; this page follows the SHSMO/prabook 1894 date as more likely accurate for an archival record, and flags the discrepancy.The exact birth date is uncertain: some secondary sources round Wenzlick's 1936 age to "40," implying an ~1896 birth, against the 1894 date given elsewhere.
6. This wiki's The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking book-summary page and its underlying discovery notes — used for Anderson's citation of Wenzlick's real-estate transfer indices (Ch. 12, 15, 21) alongside Hoyt's Chicago data.
7. This wiki's The Secret Wealth Advantage book-summary page — used for Patel's placement of Wenzlick in the Hoyt-to-Patel cycle lineage (Ch. 10).
8. The Real Estate Analyst (Roy Wenzlick & Co., St. Louis), digitized run on the Internet Archive — primary-source corroboration located this session that the newsletter existed as described and that its volume numbering is consistent with a 1932 first year (e.g., "The Real Estate Analyst 1934-09: Vol 3," implying Vol. 1 = 1932), with issues spanning the 1930s through the 1960s. Internet Archive search. This independently confirms the newsletter and its launch year beyond the practitioner-secondary lineage of sources 2 and 4; it does not confirm the "120+ cities" or 1943–44/1955 forecast figures, which remain reliant on the practitioner sources.The 18⅓-year cycle figure and the 1955-low forecast were not located in a directly-read primary Wenzlick text in this pass — the individual issues are scanned but were not full-text mined here.