"It's a time of hope," claims Ana Laura Pulido, a real estate broker in Mexico. While its northern neighbor remains in the depths of a housing meltdown, the Mexican real estate market has been booming.

Mexico has long found its economy overly sensitive to the happenings in the United States, so to see the country's real estate market thriving despite the turmoil in America is a very encouraging sign for our southern neighbor.

And don't think that American investors haven't started to notice this new trend.

According to Clark McKinley, the spokesman for the nation's largest pension fund, the California Public Employees Retirement System, his fund sees greater returns for its money in Mexico and has already decided to pump over $300 million into Mexican real estate funds.

The main difference between the Mexican and American homeowner is the chances that his or her home is mortgaged. At this point in Mexico, only slightly over 25 percent of all homes are financed with mortgages. That is wildly different from the situation in America, where 67 percent of all homes are mortgaged.

The mortgage gap between the countries should begin to slow however, as the nation's leader, President Felipe Calderon, has established a national goal of 1 million new mortgages a year by 2010.

Another factor that has helped insulate the nation from the mortgage crisis that is tearing through the American landscape is that lenders there have had the advantage of being more selective with who they give their loans to so far. Looking over the country as a whole, we see a shortage of about 6 million homes. Considering that we are talking about a country with a total population of 108 million, that is a pretty sizable shortage.

What the shortage has done is create serious pent-up demand and therefore allowed lenders a greater advantage in hand-picking the most trustworthy borrowers to give loans. As a result, in the third quarter 2007, mortgage delinquency in Mexico was under 4 percent, compared with 5.7 percent in America.

Calderon is expected to announce a new set of measures and goals today that will be aimed at continuing growth and combating urban sprawl.

Will the Mexican real estate market continue to show immunity to the problems facing America? That remains to be seen, but so far it looks like the country's growth is going smoothly, and with so much room to grow it seems unlikely that things will turn around any time soon.

Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor's Observer