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

The Federal government pumped billions into Fannie Mae in the last real estate bust to prevent its collapse, and it would be a disservice to taxpayers leaving 3% mortgages on the books that shouldn't be there. 

Unless you have an inside scoop, you don't know if the basement has had standing water for 6 years, rotted sheet rock, and black mold throughout, or maybe a collapsed side sewer line.

When that happens, rents collapse.  

There's no guarantee in business, except FDIC insured, and that's if gov. doesn't collapse :-)Can gov. collapse during recession ?

If you remove them and the roof collapses, they were necessary.

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.

That's probably true, but most of the area has still not entirely recovered from the Great Recession--only recently have home prices in most begun to approach 2005 levels, and those prices are still way off from 2007/right before the collapse.

I think long term buy and hold might become a more common strategy if we do see prices drop, but I'm not super confident we will since our area is somewhat sheltered from a housing collapse due to a large portion of our workforce being employed in tech and Boeing. 

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