The St Petersburg Times reports from Florida. "Home auctions are on the rise across the Tampa Bay area, bringing into bloom one of the free market's oldest price-setting methods. For Nancy Zwart, taking ads out to sell her Heritage Pines home in northwest Pasco County amounted to nine months of nothing."

"'A couple of people looked at it,' Zwart said. 'One man made an offer, then changed the settlement date 44 times.' Frustrated, Zwart and her husband turned to Pasco-based North America Auctioneers. They hoped the home auctioneer would get them $250,000 for their three-bedroom house. They got $235,500, and were grateful."

"'Last year I was getting 10 calls a week,' said Michael Peters, president of Clearwater's American Heritage Auctioneers. 'This year, I'm getting 10 to 15 calls a day.' There is a catch: Houses may come in at a price lower than what the seller hoped for, underscoring the market's appetite in an immediate and often sobering way."

"Things don't always work out, though. Peters' auction at Richey Drive ended without a sale. After one property undersold by about $25,000, the seller changed his mind and placed a minimum price on a second property. 'Sellers are not always going to get what they think they are going to get,' Peters said. 'But they weren't going to get it (by a regular sale) anyway.'"

"'We are not a magic bullet for moving the market,' cautioned Bill Holloway of Bay Area Auction Realty in Pinellas Park. 'A lot of sellers still haven't come to grips with how the market has changed.' Holloway said the number of calls he has received this year has quadrupled."

"In the rise of the home auction, auctioneers are noticing another trend, the speculators are gone. Through the 1990s and until 2001, Peters used to only get bidders whom he describes as 'end users.' Then, as the stock market boom faded, speculators who turned to real estate started to pack his crowd. But by January this year, the 'flippers' started fading out, he said."

The Sun Sentinel. "The Victorian-era home on Lake Cherokee will be auctioned off next month to the highest bidder. And to ensure lots of interest, no minimum bid is required, said auctioneer Alan Frenkel. 'That makes it exciting,' Frenkel said. 'It sends a message to the public that it's a fair-market-value sale. That motivates the market.'"

"The house was listed for sale at one point last year for more than $1.5 million. The home failed to sell last year as a regular real-estate listing, despite the area's record-hot market, so the owner now is ready to settle for whatever the auction will bring, Frenkel said. 'There are nine or 10 months' worth of homes for sale' in the Orlando area, Frenkel noted. So using an auction for an unusual property tells potential buyers 'the seller is beyond motivated,' he said."

"Orange County property-appraiser records show that the home was bought in 2001 for $650,000 and now has an estimated market value of at least $1 million. The property was last listed for sale in early 2005 at $1.59 million, according to local MLS records. Realtor Darryl Hunt, who specializes in downtown Orlando, said he is stumped as to why the property never sold last year at that asking price, which was down from $2.1 million in an earlier listing."

The New York Times. "As housing prices shot up in recent years, ARM’s gave borrowers a way to jump into the market while paying only a fraction of the interest that traditional mortgages require, at least for the first few years. But the risk they took now haunts millions of borrowers, who have seen their monthly payments skyrocket."

"Stephen Parnell, CEO of the Lynxbanc Mortgage in Boca Raton, Fla., said some of his clients had taken out so-called 'option ARM’s. 'Some people are taking that short-relief pain pill in a last-ditch effort to stay in the house,' Mr. Parnell said. 'Their hope is that the real estate market in the next two to three years will be kinder to them.'"

"Others are in more desperate situations. Mr. Parnell used an example of buyers who had used ARM’s to buy homes in new developments last year, only to be facing payments they cannot afford. They would sell their houses to rid themselves of the loan, but the builders in those developments are selling off the last of their new homes for much less than what buyers paid last year."

"One such owner, who requested anonymity rather than risk the embarrassment of exposing a financial blunder, bought a house in Port St. Lucie, Fla., as an investment in April of last year and financed the $410,000 purchase with an ARM, with an introductory rate of nearly 7 percent."

"The loan was an afterthought, since he expected to sell the house almost immediately for a profit. He didn’t, and now the developer recently sold a similar house in the neighborhood for $325,000."

"'I just didn’t know what I was doing, and I shouldn’t have done it,' said the man, who does not have enough equity in the house to refinance and who will run out of money to pay the mortgage in 10 months."