If you have been speculating in real estate, there’s a good article to read over at Fortune.com about Tom Barrack,”The King of Real Estate.”

Then Barrack launches into a parable. “I feel totally safe playing polo on a field full of pros,” says the bronzed 58-year-old. “But when amateurs are all over the field, someone can get killed. They have more guts than brains. They charge after every ball and don’t know when to hold back.” It’s the same with the U.S. real estate market right now: “There’s too much money chasing too few good deals, with too much debt and too few brains.” The amateurs are going to get trampled, he explains, taking seasoned horsemen, who should get off the turf, down with them. Says Barrack: “That’s why I’m getting out.”

Investors, take heed. Barrack may be an amateur in polo, but when it comes to judging markets, he’s the ultimate pro. Arguably the best real estate investor on the planet today, he runs a $25 billion portfolio of trophy assets, from the Raffles hotel chain in Asia to the Aga Khan’s former resort in Sardinia to Resorts International, the largest private gaming company in the U.S. Barrack’s Colony Capital of Los Angeles, one of the largest private-equity firms devoted solely to real estate, has racked up returns of 21% annually since 1990, handing investors, chiefly pension funds and college endowments, 17% after all fees. Barrack has done deals with Saudi princes, Texas oilmen, a Caribbean dictator–even with Donald Trump. He bought the Fukuoka Dome, Japan’s Yankee Stadium, in part because he calculated that the titanium in the retractable roof was worth as much as the purchase price. He bought and sold New York City’s Plaza hotel, turning a fast $160 million profit, as well as London’s tony Savoy chain, netting another $270 million. Even Trump defers: “Tom has an amazing vision of the future, an ability to see what’s going to happen that no one else can match.”

This is what he sees happening in the near future:

Today Barrack sees signs of the tech bubble mentality in the U.S. real estate market. Too much capital is chasing real estate, he complains, with hedge funds, private-equity groups, and rich investors all bidding up the same properties. “They’ve driven prices to the point where the yields on high-quality properties are like the returns on bonds, around 5% or 6%,” says Barrack. “That’s too low.” And he sees the bubble deflating soon. Barrack thinks the catalyst will be a trend that few others are talking about, a steep rise in the price of building materials and labor. “Construction costs have spiked 30% in the past nine months,” he says. The reasons: shortages of labor and materials like lumber because of the building boom, and increases in the price of oil, needed to produce everything from plastic piping to insulation to shingles.

The slump will show up first in speculative hot spots like Miami and Las Vegas, he says, where condo developers are preselling their projects for what look like big profits. When they actually build the units over the next year or two, he predicts, they will end up spending more than the units are now selling for. At that point, says Barrack, the developers will try to raise prices. “But most of these buyers are speculators,” he says. “They will either sue the developers to get the original prices or get their deposits back and walk away.” The developers will then put the units back on the market, and the glut of vacant condos will drive prices down. “It’s the busted deals caused by construction costs that will cause a turn in the market,” he predicts.

Having been in Japan the last 10 years, I don’t know a lot about the housing market in the US besides what I’ve read, but when one of the top real estate investors says there is too much money chasing too few good opportunities, it’s worth a minute to at least re-evaluate as to whether real estate is where you currently want to be.