"You have to have geographical comfort because you know the market very well, or you have long-term patient capital comfort in that if the market were to move further downward for any length of time, you could ride it out," Tobin says. "The investors in 2010 and beyond are going to be very different from the investors we were all very familiar with during the 2000s."

The fact that the market overall has not reached bottom could steer investors to particular asset classes, Tobin says. "The two groups where current values are most easily ascertainable are multifamily and hospitality, because they have the shortest lease terms--a day for hospitality, a year or two for multifamily," Tobin says. "Not surprisingly, those two classes have the highest CMBS delinquency. Investors can more easily understand value in these classes, because it's easier to see how something is operating. It's less apparent in office or industrial, because you don't necessarily have clarity on the tenants' underlying business."

Yet the forces that affect the fortunes of lodging and multifamily properties may be "even more macro" than those for other sectors, Tobin says. For example, "what are jobs and unemployment doing to multifamily in any given city? What is tourism business doing for hospitality in a given area? I guess you can pick your risks; if you want to bet that job losses are going to end, you'll go for multifamily. If you want to bet that tourism and business activity are going to strengthen, you might pick hospitality assets in a given market, or look at airport hotels, which are driven directly by the volume of passenger traffic going through the airports."

That outlook is in keeping with the Debtwire report, which cautions that investors will have to do more "prospecting" this year. It was commissioned by FTI, Bingham McCutchen and Macquarie Capital (USA) Inc., and is based on responses from 100 distressed debt investors who were interviewed in November and December of '09.