It looks like we may see a real bottoming of housing in the US. Marc Faber and Warren Buffett is looking at US housing as inflation hedges.
This article in Slate could be a tell tale sign
...As an illustrative example, consider the following from the complex where I live. In the rental portion of the facility, you can grab a 754-square-foot apartment for a minimum of $2,269 per month. In the condo portion, one door down, in a building also completed in 2008, an 868-square-foot apartment is selling for $419,900. That suggests that if you happened to have about $420,000 on hand, you could buy the condo and earn over $27,000 a year renting it out. That’s a yield of more than 6 percent on your investment purely out of rental income. You don’t need to worry about whether the unit will appreciate in price or not over time, ...