I would NEVER spend $7,500 on a kitchen in a low income rental.

The feds can easly solve the sub prime problem raise home values and keep rates moderatley low and a few other things as well :idea:

Low interest rates back than spur real estate to an end with a subprime story for the climax top. 1990 & 2000 & 2010 crash, buy, buy, is the market like the 1990 crash no way man.........................................its about the same.

If I pretend that none of that will ever occur, I can claim an extremely low expense ratio today, but it won't reflect reality over time.On the other extreme, the big apartment building (the pink elephant) that I purchased in January has one apartment that has been vacant for a couple of years.

The bad news is that there appears to be an endless supply of speculators with money.

I've got the easiest way in the world to get started in real estate investing...and the fear factor is low...Are you ready...it is so simple...Move out of your home...and rent it out!

We could:1) Cash out our $3,000 index fund and $1,000 in individual stocks, taking a loss (this loss won't help us with taxes, our income is so low we get everything back anyways), and scrounge up loose change for the rest.2) Ask our bank to lower the interest rate on our debit card credit line (currently 9.75%), extend our credit from $1,000 to $5,000 and live off credit this summer until we can take out more student loans in the fall.

This gets us back to what is largely interpretation, and the down side of what the second appraiser, who derives his income from the business he gets from the lender (read incentive to keep it low,) will come up with as a value.In a down market when you are using only very recent comps, however inappropriate they may be, the math says that you will send values lower at a much faster pace – thus the downward spiral we are seeing in some areas.

My realtor friend said lets see how low they will go and we offered $27K ... ended up settling for $34K....

I've heard percentages as low as 33%.