A housing report from the Baltimore Sun. "Steve and Debbie Lombel put their four-bedroom Colonial in Odenton on the market in May, figuring it could take maybe four months to sell a house in the mid-$800,000 range. But eight months later, the now-empty house is still sitting on the market."

"The couple and their children have since relocated to temporary quarters in South Carolina for Steve Lombel's job. They have borrowed from their anticipated equity and sale to build a new house. Their agent has held 21 open houses. They've cut their asking price three times and now are offering to pay mortgage loan points."

"Such is life after the housing boom. Sales of homes across the Baltimore region plunged 19.34 percent last year from 2005. As listings mount, an unprecedented number of unoccupied homes for sale are piling up, creating unexpected headaches for homeowners."

"The number of vacant homes for sale nationally jumped more than 30 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, to 1.9 million homes. That's about half of all single-family homes on the market, said Michael Carliner, vice president of economics for the National Association of Home Builders."

"More than a third of those, 825,000, are in the southern region of the United States, which includes Maryland."

"'The share of vacant for-sale is unusually high, compared to anytime in history, really,' Carliner said. 'Over the past few years, total housing production has been beyond what the underlying fundamentals would indicate.'"

"Local real estate agents say the surge in unoccupied homes is apparent across all price brackets in the market. 'A lot of people are calling me concerned; they're carrying two mortgages and that's not fun,' said Frank Lanham, a real estate agent based in Fells Point. Nearly half his listings are unoccupied houses."

"'The longer homes for sale remain vacant, the more desperate on average become the sellers,' said economist Anirban Basu in Baltimore. 'The growing number of vacant homes means more sellers out there are ready to be realistic about the market to drop prices.'"

"And buyers, sensing weakness, tend to pull back and wait for prices to fall more, he said: 'If buyers are waiting longer, then an increasing number of homes become vacant, which means sellers become desperate and prices fall further. That's where we are in the cycle.'"

"Agents say that vacant homes for sale are often a result of job relocations that force the seller to move before the house can be sold. And in other cases, buyers decide to buy before they've sold their house to take advantage of a deal but then have trouble selling a then-unoccupied house, agents said."

"'I do have one listing now where the buyers have already purchased a home and moved into it, which is happening more often now,' said agent Lisa Edleman. 'And I'm showing buying clients more unoccupied homes as well.'"

"Buyers often sense a level of desperation in the sale of a vacant house, even when a seller is determined to hang on as long as it takes to get the asking price."

"'Sellers like the Lombels are between a rock and a hard place,' said the couple's agent, Lore Peterson,. 'They're caught in a situation like many sellers where the prospective buyer that's buying and has a piece of property to sell wants to make sure they have an offer on their property first. If the property the prospective buyer is selling isn't moving, the [sellers] are stuck.'"

"Waiting it out led to many sleepless nights for seller Dan O'Connell. O'Connell and his wife, who had decided to downsize, put their house in Bel Air on the market last May. In June they found a house they wanted to buy in Sparks. They settled on their new house in July, still without a single offer on their Bel Air house."

"'We didn't want to lose the house in Sparks,' said O'Connell. 'I just never thought it would take this long to sell our house. There was a lot of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.'"

"The couple moved to their new house in August, hoping that the Bel Air house would have a better chance selling as a vacant home. At the beginning of September, they found a new agent and drastically reduced their price, by $73,000, to $302,000."

"'At some point you've got to cut your losses,' O'Connell said. 'It was costing so much a month to be carrying three mortgages,' totaling more than $3,000 monthly, including the old mortgage, the new mortgage and payments on a bridge loan.'"

"The price reduction worked. O'Connell sold his house last month and now feels relieved to have that experience behind him. 'It was extreme anxiety, and I was short-tempered,' he said. 'It just was hanging over my head constantly. I kept hearing, 'It will sell, it will sell,' but when? The hardest thing was, how low do you go with your price, and at what point do you decide it's costing me money to get a certain price? I had to accept the fact that it's gone to being a buyer's market.'"

"The Lombels feel confident that their latest incentive, offering a buydown on a buyer's interest rate, will bring an offer. Otherwise, they too will have to lower their expectations. 'In February, we would have to re-evaluate and see where things are, and if we would reduce it more or try another incentive,' Debbie Lombel said."