Real estate might be bottoming out

Vulture funds are buying SoCal land at 15 cents on the dollar, planning to hold 3-5 years, then sell at a profit.

A savvy real estate investor friend in L.A., after years of not finding anything to buy because prices were so high, is just now starting to maybe buy a few houses in the San Fernando Valley for, say, $390,000 that were $650,000 eighteen months ago. (These homes are bank-owned or foreclosures and there are so many of them they are driving all prices down.)

He is also a buy-and-hold investor with a multi-year time frame. When real estate finally bottoms out, it will be because people like him started buying. When you think about it, a vulture fund is about the same as a long-term value investor – buying cheap, holding for years, then selling for a gain.