Enough about boom and bust in the housing market are some areas are seeing boom, bust, boom?
Buyers are taking a second look at areas decimated by the real estate downturn, according to an April 7 article in BusinessWeek.

First-time home-owners are suddenly entering bidding wars with real estate speculators from as far away as Spain and Germany, BusinessWeek wrote.

“I look for markets that are downtrodden,” Rich Lehrer, a North Carolina investor, told the magazine. “I’m expecting to get better yields than I would get on my cash.”

Sales on the Gulf Coast of Florida, California’s Inland Empire near Los Angeles, and the Las Vegas metropolitan area surged by more than 80 percent in February against the same month last year, the report said.

One person interviewed, a 31-year-old Las Vegas resident, scored a $140,000, 3-bedroom home that previously sold for $350,000, the report said.

So onto the million-dollar question: “Are we at the bottom?” Christopher Thornberg, an economist with Beacon Economics, asked BusinessWeek. “We are getting close.”

Most experts believe that in some areas the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction of the bubble that sellers can’t help but get back in the market. That said, it might just signal a floor to falling real estate prices, not a swing back north.

BusinessWeek said inventories — always deeply connected to price — are “falling fastest in markets where speculators and first-time buyers are driving the action. Those parties don’t have to put their own homes on the market to make a deal. It remains vexingly difficult for home-owners who have bought in the past five or so years to sell one property and buy another. On top of that, government incentives of up to $8,000 in tax credits for first-time buyers and low mortgage rates engineered by the Federal Reserve are luring shoppers who otherwise would be sitting out. If the government were to take away the punch bowl, markets that seem to be bottoming could well turn down again.”

Some small businesses are planning for an economic upswing, and they are rethinking business models, launching new marketing campaigns, considering real estate deals, and some even hiring new staff, said the Associated Press.

These business owners say they are moving past short-term thinking about the economy. Donn Flipse, owner of Field of Flowers, floral superstores in Florida, told the AP, “Business is going to get better, so I’m going to do something to position myself to do even better than my competition.”

The real estate market around the country has been especially hard hit by the recession, putting many small companies out of business. But some survivors are looking toward an upswing in the housing market.

Kathy Braddock, co-founder of Charles Rutenberg Realty in New York City, said she’s readying for the next boom in a city where real estate is king. She told the AP the company is improving technology so it can take on more agents – preparing to go from 250 to 1,000.

Lorrie Thomas, who runs an Internet marketing training firm in California, started implementing changes to her business model early in 2008 and launched a new Web site this March.

“That’s the best part, to do it now,” Thomas told the AP. “Other companies, when the boom kicks back in, they’re going to start doing what I did a year ago.”