But it sounds like the pendilum is swinging.. maybe its time to jump on dirt

the floors are great, have them professionally done by someone who does floors only and they will look better than anything you could replace them with and cost far less... make sure they are FLOOR guys... not some jack of all trades.

I'm a member of one of the baltimore REIA facebook group pages and its a network of investors like me asking for referrals of top investor friendly contractors for every trade.

Just because you may not be in a swing state doesn't mean the state congressional races don't matter,they do!

We have seen a massive ongoing deleveraging effort by policy makers in the following steps:(1) Tightening the mortgage programs through FHA;(2) "Putting back" loans of lower quality through 2 Fs in order to force banks to tighten even more;(3) Giving incentive to short sales;(4) Pushing forward principal deduction as far as musing on replacing DeMarco; (5) Banning prop trading of investment banks through Volker's Ruleto force their capital into real estate.

I think, rather than trying to find a possibly hypothetical 28" prehung steel frame 90 minute door and having to rip out the whole frame etc, I'm just going to screw around with the existing one to make it swing shut and make the Housing inspector happy.

We are now looking at acquiring the adjacent 8-unit building to push the other end of the tenant population (drug trade, dead beats) a little further down the street {my partner jokes that we should buy a different building at the other end of the street - as it would be cheaper - and explicitly target the other end of the local tenant population ...

Could we chat and trade knowledge and ideas?

I think the real change will be that the large PE firms and hedge funds will be able to act faster on deals when they hit the market because they are accustomed to using sophisticated trading systems to determine the value of other investments (including commercial RE) and have tons of cash ready to put to work.

As for analysis, even if you cannot invest in properties at the moment, nothing keeps you from practicing your analysis skills (just like people simulate trading stocks to learn).