I'm not touching them.Gold and most commodities will decline.

@Brian Illingworth yes i initially placed an offer at 75k and he said "hell no" and said he had received an offer at 145 "keep in mind arv was 150k" ...so i called ******** ... i didnt tell him that but i did say "if someone offered you 145k id take it"he then offered if i helped him sell at 145k id get a percentage . which im not about to waste my time doing .im silly but not stupid . the word wholesale means to purchase/sell large volume at a declined price .there is no large volume so far and no good price . this is no deal . i dont think i should waste another second of my time on this guy .

But it appears we are in a transisionary period and I'm anticipating a gradual decline from peak levels unless something dramatically changes.  

They just gradually follow the market decline until the property sells to a owner occupant at 90-95% discount which for us investors is nothing.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said today that the U.S. recession would be deeper than it had predicted previously, with fourth- quarter gross domestic product likely to decline at an annualized rate of 5 percent.

And while many areas in Texas were doing pretty well for a while, according to the RE statistics on AOL, some areas, such as Houston are now seeing a sudden decline.

Home ownership has been on a steady decline and there is no end in sight for that which would eventually be one of several factors causing downward pressure on single family home prices.

Flip strategies like wholesaling and fix and flipping will work in almost any market except decompression stages (after peak and before trough when market is declining) because the strategy is short term and not as susceptible to market trends.

I'd like to see some longer term investors write about how they handled the periods when the markets declined.  

One other thing to keep in mind about owning a condo which has also been discussed on BP and in various real estate books is the fact that condos are normally the first to lose value when the housing market declines.