> The difficulty is mainly in financing the deals, not finding them.

I suspect the reasoning for that is because the long term prospects of owning property for rent are not as rosy as they seems, once your renters start defaulting you have a real problem.

A slump in the housing market usually also depresses the rental market, but that lags behind quite a bit.

On a positive note, it may be preferable to own any kind of object with intrinsic value over cash.