• Buying foreclosed homes one at a time to turn a profit used to be the province of small investors, but now investment companies are going after large numbers of houses the hard way because banks largely chose not to sell their assets in bulk.
• That means that there may suddenly be owners with hundreds of houses that need work at the same time so the buyers can start making money.
• In one example, Colony Capital LLC recently bought a house in Lithonia, Ga.,at auction for $120,000. The firm will spend $11,000 for repairs to get it on the rental market for about $1,550 a month and figures its investors will be seeing a return of 8.2% annually. And that house was just one of 133 the company  bought in the Atlanta area that day.

From the article:

On a muggy morning earlier this month, Paul Fuhrman pried the screen off a window to get into a two-story house in this Atlanta suburb. It was just another day's work for the 43-year-old executive at private-equity firm Colony Capital LLC, based in Santa Monica, Calif. ...