The Wall Street Journal reports on a way to get home sales moving. "As a glutted real-estate market makes homes harder to sell, some sellers are trying a different approach: putting their house or condo on the auction block. In some areas along the East and West coasts and in Florida, the number of homes listed for sale has more than doubled from a year ago and prices are eroding. The market has chilled so fast that sellers have little idea how much their homes are now valued at or how to attract buyers. That creates a perfect opening for auctioneers."

"Bill Loper put his house in Destin, Fla., on the market with a real-estate broker last year, asking about $510,000. With lots of other homes for sale nearby, 'we were getting no lookers, no offers,' Mr. Loper says. In March, with still no prospects, he put the home on the block in an auction. It sold it for $435,000. 'I feel like we got the fair market value of the house on that day,' he says."

"Some online auction services say they also are benefiting from the weaker housing market. Real-estate agent Glenn Mayernik used RealtyBid to help one of his clients sell a three-bedroom home on Long Island, N.Y. The house was originally priced at $440,000 and then dropped to $365,000 on the conventional market, where it stayed for three months. The house finally sold for about $340,000 at the end of a 14-day online auction."

The Christian Science Monitor looks at what makes a buyers market. "Real-estate reports all point to a slowdown after a long boom, but don't assume that it's suddenly a buyers market out there. Yet in most metro areas, the current cool-off doesn't mean a surplus of bargain deals."

"Experts have a warning for today's home shoppers: It often takes a year or two for prices to adjust downward in a slowdown. So far, many areas appear to be in a 'topping out' phase more than a 'bottoming out.'"

"So far, the market shift is visible more in the behavior of buyers and sellers than in the prices. 'In the past, buyers were taking properties just as they were..because they were afraid of prices going up,' says Linda Behnke, assistant manager at a (real estate) office near San Diego. 'They were just happy to just get the house.' Now, by contrast, buyers are 'going to a store that's fully stocked.' It's unusual to sell a home within 30 days near her office in Rancho Bernardo."

"'We're trying to settle in to where prices should have been' without some of the recent froth, Ms. Behnke says. That means it feels like a buyer's market now, even though the median price, the middle price of all homes sold, hasn't yet dipped."

"Some builders are throwing in free granite countertops, while ordinary sellers are making sure their homes don't need obvious repairs."

Myrtle Beach Online reports on builder incentives in South Carolina. "Big builders, taking cues from the auto industry to sell their oversupply of homes, are offering big incentives. The deals are aimed at making cautious buyers during this real estate slowdown take the plunge and purchase."

"'[National builders] are seeing sales falling in general, seeing cancellation rates pick up, and they're using the incentives to help drive sales and use it to sell inventory that they didn't plan on having,' said Todd Vencil, who covers eight publicly traded home builders."

"Builders are not only competing with each other, but with ballooning inventory, said home builder analyst Jeremy Pinchot. 'The result is that some builders who want to satisfy Wall Street with the best results possible, even in a declining housing market, are offering higher incentives to capture market share and drive volumes,' Pinchot said."

"Lennar Corp. is offering no payments until 2007 in its Brighton Woods single-family subdivision off S.C. 707 in Murrells Inlet. The company is also offering no closing costs. 'The way the market is right now, everyone's offering something. We'd make the payments until 2007. It's working pretty good,' said Donnie Long, Myrtle Beach division president. Long said he is expecting more spec homes in Brighton Woods in the next few months."

"Once builders start offering these kind of large incentives, it can be a competitive cycle, Pinchot said. 'Sometimes, the high cancellation rates for one builder are because another builder began offering better incentives on a similar product as the market deteriorated, then the buyer jumped ship. Eventually the original builder will have to increase incentives to lure buyers from the other builder,' he said."

"Builders aren't saying how long they'll be touting incentives, but analysts expect the enticements to stick around a while.'