While home prices still haven’t hit bottom nationally, demand is starting to grow, especially for distressed properties on the low end of the market.

Large scale investors, like hedge funds and other private equity firms are rushing in with cash on hand, and that gives them the upper hand in competition for these properties.

So how does an individual investor, without extra cash lying around, get in? Retirement funds.

It may sound risky, but with strong rental demand and relatively little supply of single-family homes, it could be far less risky than the stock market. That’s because your gains are largely coming from rental income, not home appreciation, which is why this works so well in today’s market.

“Here in Reno, prices are half of what they were at the top of the bubble, so, yeah, it might go down a little bit more but I don’t think it will go to zero, like some of my stocks have gone to zero,” says Terry Vander Ploeg, who invested $105,000 in a Reno foreclosure.

The catch is that you have to do it through what’s known as a self-directed IRA. Not a lot of firms do this, but some do: Guidant Financial, Sterling Trust, IRA Resources and PENSCO are a few. The firms act as custodian of your self-directed IRA, holding the property and dealing with all associated expenses.

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Typically when rents go up, more renters turn to home buying.

When home prices go up, more turn to renting, but today’s housing market is anything but typical.

Rents were up 3 percent nationally in January, year-over-year, according to a soon-to-be released new rental index from Zillow.com. Home prices, however, were down 4.6 percent annually.

When you look locally, the numbers are more dramatic.

In some markets, rents rose almost as much as home values fell. Take Chicago, for example, where rents were up just over 9 percent annually while home values were down just over 10 percent. The same is true for Minneapolis, where the divide is nearly the same. In San Francisco and Detroit, rents are up around 5 percent while home prices are down the same. It begs the question, as the rent vs. own divide grows, will the rental bubble suddenly burst?

Right now investors are rushing to get in on cheap foreclosures, hoping to turn them around for quick rental income. The regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the FHFA, is in the midst of a pilot program to sell 2500 foreclosed properties to investors as rentals. The bulk of these properties are already rented, which means buyers get a turn-key investment with instant returns.

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Remember how we all blamed investor/flippers using faulty financing for the housing crash?

You know, these are all the bad guys who ran up home prices to their own profit, with no concern for the inevitable fallout; they colluded with overzealous, borderline blind, lenders who gave anybody and everybody a loan with no attention paid to their ability to repay said loan.

That’s all over now. You can’t get a loan without pledging your first born in collateral, and if you’re an investor, you rank somewhere just below Angelo Mozilo.

Or do you? Last month Fannie Mae made a little change in the rules for all-cash buyers to apply for mortgages. I don’t recall a press release, and I’m quite sure I’m on their mailing list. But there it is, “Announcement SEL-2011-5,” a “Selling Guide Update:”

Currently, Fannie Mae requires a minimum of six months to elapse between the time a borrower purchases a home and subsequently applies for a cash-out refinance.

The Selling Guide has been updated to allow a cash-out refinance within six months of a purchase transaction when no financing was obtained for the purchase transaction.

There are of course all kinds of parameters, including maximum LTV (loan-to-value ratio), documentation, arms-length transaction and “all other cash-out refinance eligibility requirements and cash out pricing applied.” The mortgage cannot be larger than the value of the home of course.

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