Filed under: Forecasts, Press releases, Consumer experience, Money and Finance Today, Personal finance, Housing

Every dark cloud has a distress sale. That’s the old saying, isn’t it? Well, perhaps things look pretty bad for the mortgage industry, but I can guarantee you one thing. Real estate investors are eagerly awaiting for the dust to settle so they can pounce on distressed properties which will need to be liquidated for pennies on the dollar. I can hear them drooling from here.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but last time I checked, commercial banks aren’t especially fond of holding title to single family dwellings. Given the possibility that nearly 2 million homes are slated for foreclosure in the next year, that could make for a lot of motivated selling. Many of those distressed homes are in highly desirable areas and I’m sure that there will be plenty of duplexes and quad unit apartment buildings caught up in the fray. The board rooms of large real estate holding companies must feel like war rooms right about now.

If you would like to get a feel for our government’s official position on the matter, have a look at The Real Estate Realist. You will find insight there into what has been officially declared by the Joint Economic Committee as its position on the matter. The committee press release, peppered with words such as loss, destroyed and catastrophe, does little to ease national concerns about a real estate scene in flux. In fact, what I read of the release could be characterized as an astounding declaration of the obvious. I will concede however that the report did make nice use of a tsunami metaphor.

If you have a lump of cash that you’d like to invest in something that you can set your feet on, now is the time to begin your research. It’s time to begin surveying the field but don’t be too eager to move in for the kill just yet. The massive real estate devaluation that seems to be impending has not yet gotten up to speed. I have a feeling that there will be absolutely astounding regional real estate bargains beginning to surface going into the second quarter of 2008 as cash strapped banks scramble to unload real estate they have no desire to hold on to.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.