The Gazette reports from Colorado. "Nancy and Dana Barber realized they had to do more if they hoped to sell their four-bedroom, four-bathroom home. Last year, they installed oak floors, kitchen appliances, bathroom floor tile, a furnace, central air conditioning and window coverings and painted the inside. The tab: $26,300."

"'We’re moving,' Nancy Barber said. 'We have to sell it. In my opinion, it had to be as perfect as it could be for someone when they walk in the door.'"

"But up to now, few people have. The Barbers have had only three showings and no offers since the home went on the market nearly seven weeks ago. At the start of 2007, nearly 1,000 more homes were listed for sale by area real estate agents than a year earlier in Colorado Springs and the Pikes Peak region — a 25 percent jump in supply that’s given buyers a chance to be picky."

"Home sales in December were down 24.5 percent from the same month a year earlier, according to the Realtors Association."

"'There’s too much inventory,' said (broker) Joe Clement. 'It’s common sense that it’s more toward the buyers’ side. It’s not like prices are collapsing and there’s a desperate feeling. But it’s just that there’s so much competition out there, and so the buyer can get a very, very good deal.'"

The Denver Post. "Colorado suffers from a high foreclosure rate today partly because the national lending industry misread the Denver market, an expert told a Denver task force on foreclosures."

"Lenders engaged in 'parachute financing' throughout the West, swooping in, believing there was money to be made in fast-growing states with rising house prices, Tom Clark, a VP of Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., said."

"Kathi Williams, director of the state Division of Housing, warned that Colorado's foreclosure epidemic is far from over. 'We have over 37,000 loans delinquent in Colorado as of today,' she said, including more than 10 percent of all subprime loans to higher-risk borrowers."

The Review Journal from Nevada. "For all of 2006, Las Vegas had 36,051 new home sales, down 7 percent from the previous year. The resale market hit the skids in Las Vegas as inventory grew to more than 21,000 and homes sat on the market for six months without getting a bite."

"The resale median of $285,000 is unchanged from a year ago. 'It's so useless to generalize, since the market here is so diverse. We keep hearing about median prices going up, but all it means is that the few houses that sold have more above that median than below. That figure says nothing to the average home seller who keeps dropping his price and has had no offers for six months,' Kurt Lehman of Realty One Group said."

"Lehman found 1,454 single-family homes that closed escrow in December. The MLS showed 656 contingent sales, which means they're in escrow but open for backup offers, usually indicating the buyer must still qualify for the loan or has another house that must be sold first."

"Jeremy Aguero of a Las Vegas research firm, said he expects existing home prices to go negative in the first and second quarters this year. 'Realistically, housing prices have already dropped 7.5 percent,' he said."

The Reno Gazette Journal from Nevada. "Builders' tighter budgets caused by the housing slowdown continued to weigh down the Reno-Sparks office market in the fourth quarter, according to two separate reports."

"In the fourth quarter, Grubb & Ellis reported that 18.8 percent of office space was vacant, while Colliers reported an increase in the vacancy of garden office buildings, common in south Reno, to 16.5 percent."

"'I think we are going to see this for awhile,' said Brian Armon, at Grubb & Ellis. 'There was a big push when the residential market was growing so rapidly and we had new companies coming in, which were primarily the national home builders. All of those now have significant amounts of sublease space on the market that they acquired when they thought they were going to continue to grow at that pace.'"

"'The major corporations that are here are real quiet. They are just waiting to see what the (national) economy does in 2007, and it's 50-50 whether we have a small recession or moderated growth,' said Tim Ruffin, senior VP of Colliers' Reno office properties group."

The Arizona Republic. "Metropolitan Phoenix's ailing home-building business got a prescription for a return to health Thursday, but some of the medicine may be hard to swallow."

"Analysts RL Brown and Greg Burger told a crowd of about 1,300 housing and development professionals that Phoenix's new-home market will get better after this year. But that is expected to happen only if builders get serious about such things as reducing speculative-home inventory and prices."

"And they decried the threat from 'financing from Disneyland' that offers exotic mortgages to underqualified buyers. They also emphasized that the depth of the damage caused by mortgage fraud hasn't been calculated. 'The challenge isn't over yet,' Brown said."

"He estimated that as many as 25,000 unsold spec homes are sitting on the market, the result of buyers backing out of deals when they couldn't sell their existing homes."

"Here are some items on Brown's list of the market's cracks. New home developments too quickly became resale communities as early investors competed with builders. The Valley's loss of its affordable edge compared with other big cities."

"More risky mortgages. They have opened the door to allow investors to buy multiple houses and other home buyers to potentially commit fraud and put struggling buyers into more house than they can afford. The collapse of the resale market due to too many overpriced listings."

"And here's what Brown believes needs to happen for the market to come back. Home builders have to get rid of their excess inventory, all the spec homes sitting empty and unsold. Reposition edge subdivisions to give buyers more value or, in my words, cut home prices on houses far from jobs."

"Builders pulled more than 60,000 permits for new homes in both 2004 and 2005, but this year's slowdown cut the number drastically."

"The analysts expect permits to total 41,000 this year and 44,000 in 2008. They expect the market to hit 47,000 permits in 2009 and 50,000 in both 2010 and 2011 as the market recovers."