We basically got everything done in the nick of time. It was very intense.

I remember being on Sabine Lake at midnight, and Hurricane Rita was several miles offshore. Standing waves of water were being pushed into the lake at 4-6 feet per second. It was a very dark night so we had to work with headlamps. It was quite a sight.

Once we identified the instrumentation we needed, we had to act fast. It was September 20th, and the hurricane was supposed to make landfall a few days later. We ordered the data loggers on September 21st, and we knew it would take a day to get them in. In the meantime, we were building protective housings for all the loggers, getting our sampling plan together, and just scrambling around the clock to get everything together. We went to the local UPS office to basically get the loggers off the truck on the morning of the 22nd and left our Ruston office at 1pm for the coast.

A database is being built to house all of the data we collected, and by displaying the data in a time-series manner, USGS scientists will get a visual sense for the flood inundation as reported by the loggers.

Our mission has always been to help investors create win-win scenarios that benefit both the troubled homeowner and the investor. The owner in distress saves some equity for a new start, and the investor realizes a profit on the resale of the home. That's far better than having the owner lose everything in an auction on the courthouse steps.

Other Florida cities are showing similar price profiles, with the biggest inventory buildup on the state's West Coast. That buildup will lead to increased time on market and put more downward pressure on prices.