We analyze whether mid-level managers in securitized finance were aware of the housing bubble and a looming crisis in 2004-2006 using their personal home transaction data. To the extent that the practice of securitization may have led to lax screening of subprime borrowers, we find that the average person in our sample did not expect it to lead to problems in the wider housing market. Certain groups of securitization agents were particularly aggressive in increasing their exposure to housing during this period, suggesting the need to expand the incentives-based view of the crisis to incorporate a role for beliefs. The recent financial crisis has spurred a large literature studying whether poorly designed incentives led Wall Street to take excessive risks in the housing market, leading to disastrous consequences. The key friction in this narrative is that agents on Wall Street did not have incentives appropriately aligned with outside stakeholders such as shareholders (Bebchuk, Cohen, and Spemann, 2010; Bhagat and Bolton, 2011), or other stakeholders such as creditors, taxpayers, and society at large (Acharya, et al. 2010; Bolton, Mehran and Shapiro, 2011; Edmans and Liu, 2011; Rajan, 2006, 2010). A comparatively smaller literature emphasizes the role of distorted beliefs about house prices. The theoretical literature emphasizes that over-optimistic beliefs about house prices may have arisen due to behavioral biases and cognitive dissonance (Barberis, 2012; Benabou, 2011; Burnside, Eichenbaum, and Rebelo, 2011; Gennaioli, Shleifer and Vishny, 2011, 2012) or money illusion (Brunnermeier and Julliard, 2008). The empirical debate about whether fundamentals were driving house prices unfolded in real time (Himmelberg, Mayer, and Sinai, 2005; Mayer, 2006; Shiller, 2006, 2007; Smith and Smith, 2006), with subsequent anecdotal evidence of biased beliefs from Lewis (2011) and systematic evidence about sentiment from Soo (2013). Anecdotally, many people believed that house prices would never fall at a national level, and perhaps over-extrapolated house prices based on past trends.