The articles in the paper used to be all about how prices kept going up up up.

Now they are about the cooling off.

This is a good article with a terrific graphic. I love graphics :)

Let me see here, you are taking in $1000 a month in rent but you are paying $2150 a month on the mortgage? Get ready to hand that shirt over...

First the sales numbers drop, then the sales start to dry up, then the prices fall, then the panic sets in... People tell me that real estate is always "local" but in a world of global capital, "local" has a whole new meaning.

Homes Get Cold

In Once-Booming Markets Such as the Florida Coast, Housing Sales Languish

By MICHAEL CORKERY

April 12, 2006

MIAMI -- Todd Linsley, a 37-year-old investor, bought a three-bedroom house in Stuart, Fla., for about $318,000 in late 2005. His original plan was to quickly flip the property -- which is in a new housing development about 40 miles north of West Palm Beach -- by selling it for as high as $425,000. But when he saw that the market was turning, he decided to list the home for $379,900. It's been on the market since early January with no takers.

Mr. Linsley says home builders keep discounting unsold houses in the neighborhood -- sometimes axing as much as $100,000 off the original asking price. He says he can't afford to go that low. "If I got in a jam I would have to drop the price, but I am not at that point," he says.

So now he's renting his investment house out for $1,000 a month, while paying a $2,045 monthly mortgage and a $108 monthly homeowner's association fee. "My Plan B was always to rent it out. I am not going to lose my shirt," says Mr. Linsley, a salesman for a medical-products company.

Homes that just last year were selling so rapidly that they stayed on the market for just days or even hours -- condominiums on the Florida coastline, desert haciendas in California and Arizona, town houses in Washington, D.C. -- are now languishing without buyers or even prospects. Many once-booming markets are seeing double-digit declines in sales.

Home sales have been slowing for several months, but real-estate agents in some of these formerly red-hot markets have been surprised at how suddenly market conditions have deteriorated in the past few months.

...

About a year ago, when the market was stronger, Mr. Morgan sold homes to several out-of-state investors, who never saw the property in person. "It's really no different from the dot-com [bust]," Mr. Morgan says. "The people who bought the [low-quality homes] got clobbered." He says he refused to sell poor-quality homes to his clients. "If I didn't have any ethics, I could have made a million dollars last year."

The swelling supply of condominiums is also causing concern. In Miami-Dade County alone, there are roughly 70,000 new condos either under construction or nearing construction, and an additional 25,000 units that have been announced but don't have final approval, says Michael Cannon, managing director at Integra Realty Resources-south Florida, which analyzes the local market.