The Palm Beach Post reports from Florida. "Big home builders have been warning Wall Street for months that housing demand just isn't what it used to be. They're slashing profit targets as stocks slide and would-be home buyers try to make sense of it all. Even in Port St. Lucie, the country's third-fastest-growing city, the trend is playing out."

"For proof, look no farther than the 203 single-family home permits in August, down 70 percent from the 669 permits issued in August 2005. The figure has been dropping all summer."

"With the real estate market showing little signs of revival, some condo converters are facing this dilemma: Should I keep trying to sell these units as condos, or just give up and go back to apartments? Folks who bought units in condo conversions are starting to realize their new homes still operate more like a rental apartment than a condo. Short-term renters are being cultivated, even as sales continue slowly."

"As condo conversions limp through the summer, it seems the longer sales go on, the more some buyers become skittish and cancel their reservations. At the 160-unit Pineapple Grove Village in Delray Beach, for instance, sales and/or reservations stood at 104 in September 2005. But as of July 1, that figure had dropped to 85, Jack McCabe said."

"Another Strand condo has unraveled completely. Developer Cary Glickstein has canceled The Strand condo in downtown Delray Beach and returned $15 million in deposits. A factor that ended the project: Glickstein's buyers were tired of the waiting game. The final straw was seeing one buyer, 'near tears,' come into the sales office, Glickstein said. The buyer had used his daughter's college tuition for his down payment.'"

The Sun Sentinel. "Michael Perlmutter's someone who spots homes in foreclosure or preforeclosure and then resells them. 'Eighty percent of the part-time weekend investors who dabbled in real estate have folded,' he said. Perlmutter said he gets five to seven calls a day from people in financial difficulty looking for someone to buy their houses. 'There's never been a better time than right now because of the supply,' he said."

"Gone are the campers, the speculators who lined up, sometimes for days, to snap up prime condo units at early prices. Local expert Mark Zilbert in Miami Beach, said that half the buyers who hold contracts on preconstruction condos, most of them real estate speculators, don't want to complete the purchases on their condos."

"'They just want their deposit back to get out of it,' he said. 'So an opportunity lies for someone approaching a buyer who bought an apartment in 2003 or 2004 and offering them their contract price.'"

The Pensacola News Journal. "More than a dozen Perdido Key condominium associations are alleging the county has overvalued their property. In 2005, values shot up as supplies dwindled and demand for housing surged. This year, properties are languishing for months on the market, if they sell at all."

"'The actual values for 2006 are going down because of a glut of condos,' said Chuck Hoffman, who owns property on Perdido Key."

The Naples Insider. "New construction developments (and apartment conversions) released in 2004 and much of 2005, that would normally take several years to sell, took just a matter of days to sell to investors. When built, many investor owners wanted out, vs. waiting for some future date to sell. Basically, rolling several years worth of future listings of homes, forward to today."

"The market has homes that would not normally even exist, listed for sale. And if they did exist would be owned by an end-user buyer, and not be for sale. Overall, Naples has about a 19 month supply of homes for sale. At least 50% of homes are listed significantly above current market prices and have only a lottery's chance of selling."

"When sellers realized they could not get 20% higher than peak, they lower their prices to the peak price levels, when they could not get peak prices, then some sellers listed below peak pricing. I can site hundreds of examples were homes have sold by 30% or more off of original list price."