Barrons has one columnist starting to see the housing bubble. "I have long argued that we're not in a nationwide housing bubble, although we've had some local ones. Therefore, I didn't think we would see a general housing crash. But I must admit I'm worried that we might see more than just corrections (10% or so) in some areas. And so are several experts and real-estate professionals with whom I've spoken this week."

"'I don't think nationwide you'll see a bust,' says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com. But we might in certain markets, he adds, the usual suspects like Miami, Las Vegas and Phoenix."

"And we may get some sense of how deep a correction we'll have sooner than we think. 'This is a watershed moment,' says Jonathan Miller, president and chief executive officer of a large New York real-estate appraisal firm. 'If we're going to see trouble, it's going to be over the next 12 to 18 months.'"

"Bear markets, be they in stocks, housing or commodities, go through certain identifiable phases, like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's famed five stages of dealing with dying, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. 'It's a three to five-year cycle on the downside,' says Kenneth Rosen at UC Berkeley."

"We've already passed stage one, characterized by 'a falloff in new sales and orders,' says Rosen, and are just entering stage two, in which unsold inventories build up. That may be where the crunch begins."

"'If inventories keep rising, the pressure on sellers to cut prices will be intense,' says Zandi. Prospective sellers, of course, can just take their homes off the market and live in them until they think they can get a better price. But speculators don't have that luxury: At some point they can no longer carry a money-losing investment, so they may throw in the towel and unload their once-promising albatross."

"That's stage three, says Rosen, and it usually finishes about three years from the beginning of the downturn."

"The final phase is when we see massive defaults or delinquencies on mortgage loans. That's several years away, he says, and this time the damage could be worse because of the large number of exotic loans giddy lenders extended to desperate home buyers. So, we could hit bottom by, say, 2010. Rosen predicts actual nationwide home-price declines of 5% by 2007, the first time prices have fallen in any year since World War II."

"'The boom is over,' declares Jonathan Miller. That perception no doubt has begun to trickle down to prospective buyers and sellers. And we might get some sense of whether sentiment has tipped in the other direction when the trees start to bloom again and for-sale signs go out on front lawns across America."