Think of the 2% rule as something similar to the PE ratio in the stock market.

Today we got the first confirmation that other asset managers may have finally given up on the rental conversion strategy, following the observed collapse in multi-family housing starts which crashed from 376K to 234K in April (the lowest since last summer), a drop of 142K and the worst monthly drop since 2006 when the housing market had once again peaked and was about to undergo a very serious correction.http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-16/multifamily-starts-suffer-biggest-monthly-plunge-2006-reo-rent-recovery-deadIn addition to the money-laundering aspect (confirmed previously) and the REO-To-Rent scramble by PE firms and hedge funds (which is now over as PE become active sellers of apartment rental properties), we highlighted the third implicit subsidy to the housing non-recovery:Foreclosure stuffing.

Not endorsing or commenting on "morally" whether or not big investment firms and P/E treat tenants right, but the same happens with individual landlords sometimes.

Talked to a PE today who thought the biggest structural issue would be several thousand to repair, but haven't paid him yet for a formal report.

I love short sales I'm a CD PE expert also I got my certification for short sales and they are not as hard as people make them to be you just need to create your system I use a lot of computer base for my forms and I email them to my clients and have those filled out by the time I get there I have them have all the documents that I need from them ready when I get there to their house and you usually get both sides of the check for closing, not hard to do.

I'm a securities/finance attorney in Canada, and amongst other things, I create the types of PE funds and fund structures for Reg Ds (actually Canada's equivalents, called AIs) that Bob M is referring to.  

As that "high technology business slowly slides into "low tech" side of the scale, corporations will look for ways to minimize costs because they will no longer be the "it" company and pulling the giant PE ratios. 

Maybe consider a different scenario more akin to the P/E plays out there.  

In PE, we constantly do post-mortums on deals we've passed, and track their performance years later.

There are so many "unicorns" out there right now and PE values are historically high.