The Arizona Republic has these updates on the Phoenix area. "West Valley home prices have held relatively steady since the end of 2005, but resale homes are lingering on the market longer as developers try to unload their inventory of new homes using deep discounts and other incentives."

"In the fourth quarter of 2005, the average resale home in Surprise's 85374 ZIP code sat on the market for only 11 days before being snapped up. But in the first quarter of 2006, homes in that same area remained on the market for 50 days on average. That's more than a 350 percent increase, the steepest jump among all ZIP codes in the Valley."

"With the downturn in the housing market, speculators and home buyers are canceling their reservations, pushing developers to give enormous incentives and Realtors a bigger slice of the pie."

"David Nichols, a Surprise real estate broker, says the sharpest increases are occurring in communities where the greatest number of new homes is being built, places such as Surprise, Mesa and Gilbert. 'This is just a minor hiccup that has received a lot of sensationalism,' he said. 'It's too bad.'"

"Worried about declining home values in the Valley? If you live in central Phoenix, north Scottsdale and patches of the East or West Valley, you don't need to fret. In other pockets around metropolitan Phoenix, the average price of an existing home dropped 6, 7, even 12 percent from the fourth quarter of 2005 to the first quarter of this year."

"'The Valley's housing market is going to be dicey for a while, and it's best to track it by neighborhood,' said Terry Turk, president of Sun American Mortgage of Mesa. 'I don't think we are at the bottom of the market, but it shouldn't be a dramatic drop from here.'"

"(Broker) John Foltz said home prices in established Valley neighborhoods should be stable, but newer areas on the perimeter, such as Queen Creek and the far West Valley, are likely to struggle as new homes continue to go up. Part of Glendale in the West Valley saw a 7 percent dip. The average price of a home on the southeastern edge of Mesa dropped 12 percent."

"'It's possible that home prices will drop 5 to 10 percent overall,' said Jay Butler, director of the Arizona Real Estate Center at Arizona State University Polytechnic."

"Declines should be pretty painless to most homeowners, unless they bought last year during the peak, have tapped all the equity in their homes or are trying to sell. Home prices in most of those neighborhoods shot up more than 100 percent in the past five years."