Investors Gain From Housing Slump

A wide range of real estate experts agree that much of the current weakness in sales and home prices is due to investors pulling out of the sector. And some stock market experts say that the money being pulled out of homes is finding its way into stocks.
There's been a slow migration of money from real estate to cash and then to equities for the last year or so. The shift has been an important support for the stock market.
A new money is not going into real estate, since it looks more and more like that is dead money. How much money has flowed from real estate to stocks is impossible to say for certain, but even a conservative estimate would suggest it is in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars.