A real estate note (a mortgage) is where banks invest most of the money they receive as deposits from bank customers. With prices within the housing market remaining low as soon as the Global Financial Crisis and the associated recession, many mortgages are classed as non performing notes (the marketplace value of the property is less than the mortgage value and the borrower is not making the mandatory payments on the mortgage). Banks have numerous of those varieties of mortgages on the books and wish to sell a number of them to cut their own investment portfolio risk. This situation makes it can be done for investors to get familiar with similar estate note investing fot it that your banks make and buying mortgage notes at prices that are heavily discounted.