Steps for buying real etate in the states for a canadian

I have been following the real estate market for sometime now. The real estate market in Canada seems to be quite inflated, especially in Vancouver. I don't understand how people in Vancouver can afford such expensive houses. The average housing price in Vancouver is ten types the average salary which is quite high and I think this is before taxes. The averahe ration is about six. In some cities in the states the ratio is one. With the new HST in place things are going to be harder. I will come back to this topic some other time in more detail. The real estate market down south, however, as we all know is quite soft. There are three reasons, why it is such a good time for a Canadians to buy a property in the states. First, the the prices in the states are really low 2) The Canadian dollar is almost at par with american dollar and 3) It's easy to borrow money at low rate in Canada, especially if you have some equity in your home.
Having said that, how can someone go about buying a property in the states. let's go step by step

1) How do you find the property? So far I have used couple of sites. The most user friendly site I found was ziprealty.com I know this is from an agency but it lists properties from most of the other agencies. This site is quite user friendly and it has some really cool features. The good ones are a) local info, which gives information about crime, schools, walk friendly, weather etc. If you don't know the neighborhoods very well then these features can come in handy. b) Estimated value, it tells you for how much the house was sold previously. This can give you some idea of if it's a distress sale and how much upside there could be once the market picks up.
Other site where you can do the research about a city is citydata. It has lot of information about any city in North America. The URL is http://www.city-data.com/

One other site I have used for listings is realtor.com but I find it to not as user friendly as ziprealty. just my own experience, your experience might be different.

2) Type of property to buy, Condo or Single Family home
3) Purpose of the property, investment (are you going to rent out the property?) or vacation home
4) Where to buy the a property? We will discuss about the good markets to buy in another post
5) Choosing your agent
6) Financing. You can finance from canada or you can finance in the states. There are some banks in the states which can finance Canadians buying real estate in the states.
7) Tax implications.
8) Managing the property

I would like to discuss each of this point in detail in subsequent posts. thanks