In my situation I moved back to Canada, but was not willing to sell my condo in the U.S. in a depressed market so I am renting it out (which more than covers my mortgage payment) until the condo I bought here is constructed. Hopefully by that time the U.S. market would be better and I could sell it at a better price.
Banks have made mortgages much tougher to obtain since the crash (and interest rates are higher south of the border), so many Americans could not buy a place of their own (let alone invest) so the rental market has picked up.
In places where real estate values have really plummeted, such as California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida (otherwise known as The Sand States in the real estate world), many Canadian and foreign investors have been buying deeply discounted or distressed properties (a condo near the beach in Florida could be bought for less than $100,000) and renting it out to cover the mortgage payments until things pick up. Many investors are also using these properties as their vacation home for a few weeks out of the year (properties near cruise ship ports have been extremely popular for Canadian investors), so they are enjoying the use of their investment property as well.
