Some nervous investors turning to real estate instead.(Chicago Tribune)

Move over, Beardstown Ladies: Now there's Real Estate Anonymous.

With stocks sinking and interest rates plunging, Chicagoan Dan Olsen has been plowing his money into several vacation properties for more than two years. Sitting around with a small group of friends who were doing the same, they came up with a tongue-in-cheek name for themselves because their newfound passion felt more like an addiction than a club.

"We've been pulling money out of the market and putting it into real estate. People say the stock market isn't coming back for a long time," said Olsen, who lives with a partner in a condominium overlooking Lake Michigan and who owns other properties near water in Wisconsin, Canada and Florida. "You can't go wrong with waterfront properties."

Helping to entice investors like Olsen into real estate has been a long stretch of attractive interest rates, which have continued to decline in recent months, falling to a nearly three-year low this week.

Although the Federal Reserve's string of rate cuts this year haven't directly translated into lower mortgage rates, they contribute to a climate that sees lending costs shrink generally. With Fed policy-makers widely expected to cut rates for a ninth time this year when they meet Tuesday, experts are betting on at least another round of refinancings, even if sales of new mortgages cool as the economy weakens further in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Olsen, for example, locked into a 6.5 percent, 15-year jumbo on his Chicago condominium last week, down from his current 7.125 percent, after several rounds of negotiations with mortgage specialist Leigh Friedman of Charter One Bank. "I've been watching rates fairly closely for the last year and just decided I wanted to go ahead and do it now," Olsen said.

He's not alone. Refinancing surged 36 percent during the week of Sept. 17 compared with the week before, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association of America.