When the U.S. housing market started heading south, real estate entrepreneur Danielle Robb looked for a way to recast her business.

On a trip to London in 2008, Robb discovered a show about buying second homes internationally called A Place in the Sun. After a few years of negotiations on both sides of the Atlantic, she brings the American version of the show to Discovery’s new Velocity network this week.

A former ESPN and Fox Sports co-host, Robb is the host and globe-trotting cultural explorer in bucket-list destinations like Fiji’s Coral Coast, Argentina’s wine country, and San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua. From polo and mountain biking to sheep herding and some inadvertent trespassing in Sicily, Robb says that through the show, she aims to bring fun to the potentially “bore the crap out of you” topic of real estate investment.

“Fifty acres for a hundred grand and not just land: Vineyards!” she exclaims in the Argentina wine country episode. In a seaside area, she tests out the local margaritas. “I’m not gonna lie, I already had one, well two, well three but look,” says Robb, counting fingers, back and forth to prove that she’s still stone-cold sober. (Video clip here.)

Fun aside, though, the 37-year-old serial entrepreneur knows the real estate world and how to run a business. Below is some of the advice she shared during a visit to Portfolio.com’s offices in New York.

1. A passionate pastime can become a career.

While working in sports broadcasting, Robb started attending open houses on weekends and then, starting small, she began investing her money to fix up properties and sell them for a profit.

“I just started with flipping houses, and I really just loved the idea of getting in there and gutting it and just watching it come to life,” Robb says. “I made a good amount of money on the first couple of properties that I flipped, and that just sort of snowballed for me.”

Robb left TV to pursue a real estate career, went to school for interior design and got a real estate license. In 2005 she used her house-flipping profits to launch Bella D, a Newport Beach, California-based real estate investment firm with properties in Texas, North Carolina, Indiana, Alabama and California. All was fine until around 2007 when the housing market hit the skids and it was clear that her business was going to be shifting. The next year, she spotted A Place in the Sun, and opportunities overseas.

2. Opportunities still exist in real estate in a downturn.

Despite the stubbornly depressed housing market, Robb says U.S. investors who buy distressed properties to rent or those who want to buy second homes overseas will find opportunities.

“Every investor that I talk to tells me that this is the time they make their money,” Robb says. Of course anyone who is investing needs to have cash since lending is so tight, and they also need patience.

Properties that are part of her own “10-year plan” for investment include single-family homes or duplexes in places such as Austin, Texas, as well as North Carolina, Alabama, and Indiana. She chooses places where the renter ratio is high, and hires property managers to deal with tenants. Difficulties, such as having to evict tenants, are a reality for landlords, and “you have to have the stomach for it,” Robb says.

Nationwide, rents now average $991, up from $930 in 2006, and are expected to rise to about $1,025 by 2012, according to rental performance data tracker Reis Inc. that was cited by the Wall Street Journal. The national vacancy rate for apartments dropped to 6.2 percent during the first quarter of 2011, from 8 percent a year ago.

Robb says there are still places where the dollar goes further overseas, like the 50-acre property in Argentina that includes vineyards for $100,000 and beachfront property in Mexico that she found for $300,000 that has a property manager to help with rentals. Even Europe has potential, she says.

“In places like Portugal and Spain, there’s been huge development, which means those developers will finance those properties themselves for a buyer,” Robb says. “As Americans, we’re used to having mortgages. That right there makes that a possibility.”