Then my world collapsed my children and I were in our car and hit by a truck doing 65mph while we were at a dead stop.

I fear the financial collapse of our banking system would resultin a lose of funds to  

Seeing as, on a national level at least, prices have only gone down twice since world war 2 (1991 &the housing collapse), why do you think prices will go down during a recession?

I live in CA, and like many investors, when the RE market collapsed here, I looked around for a better market to invest in.

As I am sure most of you know, at the height of the real estate collapse, Stockton was the #1 city in the country for foreclosures.

This is would a lovely benefit if I wanted to use the VA Home Loan to purchase a property that needed some TLC but didnt have the funds to do the required fixes.My research points to the conclusion that it is very hard, if not impossible to find a lender who will actually lend the VA Construction Loan (due to the housing market collapse).My question is:Does anyone know if this is true, or know any lenders who are willing to work with the VA Construction Loan?  

Uh-oh, big surprise: NAR has fudged up data to hide the magnitude of the collapse:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110222/ts_nm/us_usa_economy_housing

From there it was a domino effect that collapsed everything.So you need a cushion to protect yourself against Murphy.

The last loser multi-unit I saw was a slowly collapsing 100 year old Victorian triplex conversion wherein someone decided to skip inspections, other than that it's winner-winner-winner-winner for multi-units in our area over the last few years.I'm sure I don't have to tell you: know your rent control laws, if applicable, where you are buying!

I was thinking anything before 2010 would be getting too close to the timeframe of the market collapse.