A greedy real estate agent might just want to make a sale to an out of state investor and not give you the best advice on the best areas.

The traders or investers in any market that make the most money don't worry about tops or bottoms they just focus and catching the meat of the moves.  

All sorts of things impact that in the short term:Federal funds rateCommercial interest ratesRelative attractiveness of other asset classesRelative attractiveness of other corporate equitiesCapital inflow to and outflow from US marketsValue of the US dollarRegulation of the pension funds and other large coglomerate investors in REITs (that don't typically directly invest in property like people on this site do)Impact of technical traders who don't even know what a REIT does  ;)I suppose many of these could impact the overall real estate industry (at least the commercial property side), but I wouldn't use 3 weeks of public market action as an indicator of anything.

Now how you want to split the equity ownership depends on what your relationship is with that person, how much he will be willing to give away, how fair you want to be (or how greedy you want to be).It very much depends. 

Just one more sign that the market is becoming even more greedy and pushing closer to the tipping point.

But then prices skyrocketed and Detroit got greedy. 

A lot of the people I have spoken to are flaky or end up becoming overly greedy (even the lenders I we have worked with in the past), considering the big numbers we are working with. 

But it's also mainly feeding our selfish-greedy side in us all, if finding a "good deal" is what we're mainly focused on. 

Unless you are a professional foreign currency trader, that is.

I may be heading to an investor's event in KC tonight, "KC House Traders".