WASHINGTON--To those who thought the sport of house-hunting went out of fashion with the collapse of the housing market, think again. It's a buyer's market, and house hunters are scouring the nation for properties by the busload, literally, even in Prince William County.

On a sunny Saturday morning, 25 people from the area people boarded a bus chartered by an enterprising real estate company for a first-in-the-region-tour providing a sampling of the estimated tens of thousands of foreclosed houses in the region.

"You guys have a great opportunity today. There's not a lot of people doing this," mortgage attorney Art Grace told the 25 house hunters on the bus. "And I would say the general public doesn't know a whole lot about the great opportunity out there."

It's an idea that is sweeping the nation. Similar tours are taking place in California, Nevada, Michigan, and Illinois—states the have been hardest hit by the roaring boom-and-bust housing market crash.

Eileen Durkan of Long & Foster Realtors says she got the idea after hearing about similar tours in California. "I thought that's just going to be working its way here. Everything that happens in California eventually comes east, and we thought we'd like to be on the cutting edge."

Prince William County has been especially hard hit with a higher percentage of foreclosures than the rest of the D.C. area.

The tour visited nine foreclosed properties in the Gainesville and Haymarket areas in under three hours. They included townhomes and stand-alone homes, ranging from $200,000 to $600,000. One home was only two years old; another was marked down by $200,000.

There were 28,455 foreclosure filing in the Washington/Arlington/Alexandria metro area in 2007, ranking it 41 in the list of the top 100 largest U.S. cities surveyed by RealtyTrac. Leading the list was Riverside/San Bernardino, California, with 102, 506, and Los Angeles/Long Beach with 93,696.

Among the house-hunting "tourists" were first-time buyers, investors and and people who got on the bus because "it sounded interesting." In between stops, the riders on the bus heard from a range of speakers including a home inspector, a home warranty agent and a loan officer. The riders were given information packets and water bottles wrapped in "foreclosure tour" labels.

"This is the best idea," said one rider, "I wish they started this a long time ago."