[quote=jpinpb]Thanks, Huckleberry. It didn’t make sense and I had a very time believing any of it. But since nothing is making sense to me lately, well, I just didn’t know what to think. [/quote]

Don’t know about hedge funds and the like, but there have been reports in a number of media sites that I’ve seen reporting that “vulture” groups have been forming and are buying these blocks of inventory.

Probably not possible to know how large a slice of the market it is yet, but this would be the time that vulture groups would deem ripe – banks have so much inventory on their books with more on the way that they would be likely to consider that dumping them en masse to an investor group at a steep markdown may be cheaper to them than attempting to market and sell them all (at what is still a steep markdown, although a lesser one) on a market already saturated with foreclosures, while picking up the monthly carrying costs and performing all the needed repairs on their own dime.