Some housing bubble reports from Arizona. "The 43 building projects under way in Tempe outnumber the city's 40 square miles. It's a building boom coming primarily in the shape of condominiums. Valley-wide, developers may be overly optimistic about how many people want to live in new high-rise and loft condos. More than 8,000 condo units are planned or under construction. Market watchers say less than a quarter of all the planned projects will actually go up."

"'It's our lack of supply that creates the demand that other areas don't have,' broker Tom Tokoph said. 'You can argue five years from now, when all these buildings are in, there will be a glut.'"

"There are no fewer than eight large-scale condo complexes in the works in Tempe's core. And there are dozens of others, one as large as 742 units, popping up around the outskirts of downtown and on the shores of Tempe Town Lake."

"Developers are delaying or dumping plans to convert some Phoenix-area apartment complexes into condominiums. A year after they pulled more than 7,000 apartments off the market, condo converters are finding that buyers in many areas are not interested in paying top dollar for a refurbished rental unit."

"Apartment experts say some developers got carried away in conversion mania, overpaid for buildings and now must run them as rentals rather than selling fast and getting out."

"The condo-reversion trend has hit in other areas where too many condos were built too quickly. The turn in the Phoenix market demonstrates how quickly trends come and go in the area's volatile housing business and the inherent hazards for investors."

"Developers count on selling some of the conversions to people who already lease the apartments. Yet some of these residents find the prices too high. A woman moving out of the Hawthorne Condominiums said when the complex went condo, she rejected the proposed sales price of $230,000."

"She said she was a former real estate agent in California and was leery of condo conversions. 'I've been on the downside of a market before,' she said."

"There is a twist to how conversions are affecting the rental market. Experts say a lot of the buyers were investors who now have dumped them back on the market as rentals. 27,000 apartments have been announced as conversions since 2004 and estimated that half went to investors, with 70 percent in some projects."

"'The condo-conversion market has not been driven by the end user, Joe and Betty Home Buyer,' he said. Reid Butler, a Valley apartment and condo developer, said a lot of the investor units aren't reselling."

"'Many investors bought five to 10 units in a condo-conversion project and need to hold them for a year so they don't have to pay capital gains,' Pete TeKampe, an apartment specialist said. 'So now, they are hiring management firms and renting them.'"

"Terry Feinberg, president of the Arizona Multihousing Association, said some (investors) couldn't rent them for as much as they need to cover the monthly mortgage payments. He wonders if those condos are headed for foreclosure."

"Feinberg believes there were too many unsophisticated investors snapping up condos. He compared their behavior to tech investors in the 2000 stock market. 'Why did so many people lose money in 2000 when the dot-coms crashed?' he asked. 'The investor behavior is the same. Some people get in at the end of a trend. They have bad timing.'"