The Wall Street Journal reports on New York. "Five-Fifteen Park Avenue has everything one could want in a Manhattan home. But on most days, the limestone and beige-brick tower at the elegant Upper East Side address lacks one thing: many of its residents. More than half of the building's 35 units belong to absentee owners."

"'It can feel a little empty,' says Las Vegas developer and billionaire Phillip Ruffin."

"A number of the 180-plus residences at the Time Warner Center condominium belong to absentee owners. Thomas Siebel, who paid $28 million for his full-floor home, has rarely been there since buying it early in 2006, say real-estate professionals. The condo fees and taxes on the 79th-floor unit total almost $20,000 a month."

"Michael Linn recently spent about $2.3 million for a Manhattan residence. He says he bought the Manhattan home for convenience, but 'putting money in New York real estate was an important investment for us.'"

"The occasional occupants are troubling to some full-time residents, who say their buildings are left depressingly hollow. 'It deadens the whole neighborhood,' says Keith Irvine, a long-time Upper East Side resident. 'You sometimes get a sense that whole streets are deserted.'"

"Antonio Reid says the building can 'go dead' some weeks when many residents are gone, leaving hallways empty and his kids without playmates. 'Let's just say that my kids aren't going next door to borrow a cup of sugar,' he jokes."

From Newsday. "In Nassau, the median home price fell to $450,000 in January from $470,000 in December, down 6.3 percent from a year earlier. Nassau's median closing price is at the same level as it was in March 2005. In fact, broker Dianne Clark said it's increasingly common to sell homes at prices prevalent two years ago."

"'That's what you have to do,' Clark said. 'You have to do that. If people price them unreasonably, nothing's going to happen.'"

"A Freeport homeowner eager to move lowered the price every two weeks when there weren't interested buyers, Clark said. The small two-bedroom home in Freeport sold last month for $315,000 - $50,000 less than the original listing price in 2006."

The Democrat and Chronicle. "The market hiccupped a bit late last year, but buyers have come back in force after realizing much of what is happening with falling home prices in the South and West isn't happening in Rochester, said John Antetomaso, president of the Greater Rochester Association of Realtors."

"There were 840 home closings during the month, compared with 759 in January of last year. The Monroe County Clerk's computer system failed for a week in late December, causing some closings to be pushed to January, but the numbers were not significant enough to make much of a difference, said real estate attorney Michael Ringrose. Home closings were down 14.1 percent in December."

"Buyers are a little more cautious than they were two to three years ago, but 'buyers are willing to buy if there's value,' said John Arquette, general manager of Nothnagle Realtors, which has 570 agents in the six-county region. 'We may be headed to the market we had 24 months ago,' he said."

"Penfield resident Jim Crowley purchased and sold a home last year because his family needed more space. But Crowley did make a few concessions to the buyer. 'We sensed that things were starting to change,' he said, adding he did not want to pay two mortgages since he was building a new home."

"In December, Crowley and his wife Michele and children moved into their 3,400 square-foot home in Penfield. 'We're hoping that the house will be an investment,' Crowley said. 'We're not under any delusion that it's a hot Florida market.'"

"The intensity of the pace is not quite at the level it was two years ago, when sellers were in the driver's seat, said Rome Celli, broker in Brighton. While home sales are still strong, the asking prices are not as firm in the current market, he said."

"'What we have is a market in transition,' Celli said. 'We have to assume trends that were there last year will still be around.'"

The Staten Island Advance. "For 2006, Staten Island experiencing a 47 percent jump in the number of people who fell far enough behind in their mortgage payments to slip into some stage of foreclosure, according to year-end data. One in every 52 households here defaulted on a loan, 1.8 times the national average. By comparison, one in 121 homes in Queens entered foreclosure, and one in 96 homes in Brooklyn was in foreclosure last year."

"Experts have said the problem is driven by an increase in high-risk, predatory lending in the borough, the $6.5 billion in commercial and residential loans taken out by Islanders in 2005, and a general downturn in the housing market. Foreclosures represented about 2 percent of the 163,993 households in the borough last year."

"The Advance first reported last summer that Staten Islanders were slipping into foreclosure faster than the national average and the rest of the city, and that concern about the problem was enough to prompt Legal Services for New York to open a foreclosure prevention project in Staten Island in St. George."

"'We've been flooded with calls. We are getting calls from all over the Island and all ranges of incomes,' said Margaret Becker, an attorney with the foreclosure prevention project. The project opened one year ago and is currently working on about 15 lawsuits against lenders."

"Citywide, foreclosures jumped 40 percent from 2005 to 2006, according to RealtyTrac." "A report last year by New York University, found that the rate of sub-prime lending in Staten Island for purchases and refinances nearly doubled between 2002 and 2004, while housing prices here increased at a slower rate than in the other boroughs."

"Ms. Becker said the majority of cases involve people who have refinanced multiple times, moving from sound, affordable mortgages to risky loans and lumping unsecured credit card debt into new mortgages, often under pressure from brokers and without realizing the ramifications of those loans. She said many people often get into trouble after becoming temporarily unemployed."

"'It's because they are put into these unsound, risky mortgage products that they are losing their homes,' she said. 'On Staten Island, something really bad is going on and I can't quite figure out what it is.'"