(Updates with housing slump, Buffett comment in third and fourth paragraphs.)

Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. acquired a residential-real estate firm in Mobile, Alabama, through its HomeServices of America Inc. unit as the billionaire chairman prepares his company for a housing rebound.

Dauphin Realty, with four branches and 85 agents, will merge with an existing Berkshire-owned firm in Alabama, HomeServices said today in a statement published on its website. Terms weren’t disclosed.

A housing slump has undercut U.S. home values this year as foreclosures and unemployment of more than 9 percent weigh on consumer sentiment. Buffett, 81, said today that a recovery is inevitable once the current supply of housing is used up.

The slump is “a necessary correction, but it is not a correction that’s over in a day or a week or a month,” Buffett said at Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women conference in Laguna Niguel, California. “It will be over, there’s no question about it.”

--Editors: Dan Reichl, Dan Kraut

To contact the reporter on this story: Maryellen Tighe in New York at mtighe6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dan Kraut at dkraut2@bloomberg.net