While specific provisions of TALF and PPIP may raise some concerns, "This is the playing field," advised Mark Grinis, global real estate partner at E&Y. "Those who figure out how to navigate it will be the most active."

The panel's sole participant from outside E&Y, Ginnie Mae president Joseph Murin, also sounded the theme of positive action. He downplayed concerns about a predicted rise in residential mortgage defaults as too generalized because they paint low-default markets with the same brush as those where the incidence is higher.

"We can spend our lives worrying about what's coming or we can spend them seeing what we can do now," Murin said. He noted that Ginnie Mae issued $90 billion in mortgage-backed securities for the first quarter of this year, compared to $38 billion for Q1 2008.