Reply #3: there's still money to be made

[Clovis Sangrail]

the real estate boom made it so that people could pretty much buy a house and sell it for more without doing a thing to it because real estate was going up.

but some people did (and still do) look at the selling price for a house and how much they can sell it for if they do x, y, and z to it.
Right now isn't a great time to be doing this (understatement) but if somebody buys a place for $200k and sinks $10k of improvements into it - I'm not bothered by them trying to make a profit from their work.