Flip This House, If You Can

Roberts tells those looking to make a killing in the market to take their time and practice patience.

"This is the best time in the past decade to buy real estate, but you have to plan on holding on to it for two to five years until the market finishes correcting," he says.

His advice is hard to hear when people scan the seas of open houses in nearly every neighborhood and watch TV shows like Bravo's Flipping Out, where an entertaining young investor makes six-figure profits on each sale.

"I have people come to me and say, 'Show me how to do that,'" says Marion Napoleon, a Dallas-area Realtor. "They make it look so easy on television, and it's not, especially in the market of today. It's easy to lose money."

Harder to Qualify

When the market was loose and easy, Napoleon watched as crooked "investors" got involved by purchasing cheap properties offered through the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Program, then getting phony, inflated appraisals and selling them quickly to unsuspecting buyers.

"It was like the Wild West here, only now are we trying to pick up the pieces and learn from it."

But if your goal is legitimately to pick up some of these bargain properties to fix up and sell, are you too late? Maybe not, say the experts, but you should take a little time to learn what you may be in for.

"Even if your hope is to sell the property quickly, you need to be prepared for a long-term wait," says Walter Molony, a spokesman for the National Association of Realtors. "We always recommend that you research the cash flow of comparable properties and how long it takes to rent them. Also, the rule of thumb is to have six months of mortgage payments in reserve, since things don't always work out as planned."