Vultures

Professional real estate investors are now buying houses in America for a fraction of the once-listed price. Some are calling them "vultures", but that smacks of envy. If these people weren't buying now, nobody would be buying, and the market would dip even deeper and lord knows where that would lead.

So far as I know, here in UK/Eu, the market has dipped a lot, but not quite this dramatically (actually, probably the prices given in the video are outstanding examples rather than the norm). They are only about down to the level they would have been at without the housing bubble, not below. Yet. I still wait and watch, like I've done and said for five years.

Funny enough, just today I was reading Thoreau's Walden, and he talked about how it's a plague on the land in the West that our lives are driven by envy, so everybody has to have a house which is at least as big as the neighbors, driving us into debt and servitude. His Walden cabin was around 3 by 5 meters, which is about the size of the rented rooms I lived in for the first twenty years of my adult life. I only bought an apartment when I could afford to buy it cash.