In late April, Mark Foster, attorney at Snell & Wilmer in Southern California, put together a couple of distressed opportunity funds for his clients.

The clients wanted to get out in front of what they anticipated would be a lot of distress hitting the commercial real estate market.

"Everybody has a lot of dry powder, so they wanted to get in position and start buying," Foster said. "So I did a couple of distressed opportunity funds initially in late April."