The Sun Sentinel reports from Florida. "When it comes to single-family homes, better to buy now. But hold off on those condominiums. That's the word from the University of Florida, which last week released a quarterly study that suggests the housing slump is stabilizing. Meanwhile, existing home sales and prices were down in both Broward and Palm Beach counties in January, the Florida Association of Realtors said this month."

"UF's report appears to be 'a lot of wishful thinking,' Delray Beach housing analyst David Levin said."

"'Just because we have seen a decline in how fast prices are falling doesn't mean they have stopped falling,' Levin said. 'And once we get to the bottom, then what? The bottom might become the new reality.'"

"The new reality in the region's marshmallow-soft real estate market is that homes in Palm Beach and Broward counties languish for weeks or months without a showing, let alone an offer."

"So savvy but skittish homeowners are considering an alternative: house-swapping. 'I can see the attraction,' said Jon Gelman, a Fort Lauderdale real estate lawyer. 'Anyone who's trying to upsize or downsize, there's a concern: are they going to be able to sell the house they're in? A lot of insecurity makes it hard to sleep at night.'"

"Ira Shanes, of Boynton Beach is concerned about falling prices. He said his three-bedroom home was appraised two years ago at $419,000; now it's worth roughly $360,000."

"'There are just too many houses on the market right now,' said Shanes. 'You just don't know for sure that your house is going to sell [the traditional way].'"

"There are, of course, potential roadblocks to trading. It's difficult to arrange if either homeowner owes more on the loan than the house is worth. And getting strangers to agree to swap properties is a bit of a long shot. 'It definitely is like trying to find a needle in a haystack,' said Gelman."

"Wellington agent Jim Corbin said he has worked only three trades in 35 years but acknowledges the market's recent slide makes the concept worth considering. 'There are so few buyers out there that anything you can do to find one is a good thing,' Corbin said. 'People certainly are being creative these days.'"

The St Petersburg Times. "With 40 homes from 19 builders on display, the Hernando Builders Association is aiming to woo buyers with low interest rates during this year's Parade of Homes."

"When considering the record year of 2005, when 4,271 single-family residence building permits were issued by the county, not many builders expect that 2007 will top that."

"'What you've got to realize is that 2005 was an anomaly,' said Dudley Hampton Jr., first vice president of the builders association. 'And it's one of those years that comes along once or twice in a lifetime as far as real estate and home-building goes.'"

"This year, the potential home buyers that Ed Velasquez has seen come through the two Lexington Homes models in the Villages of Avalon subdivision seem to just want to know what's out there."

"'I'd say that 95 percent of the people I've talked already own a home,' Velasquez said. 'And while they're looking to sell first, they're trying to make plans to figure out what they want.'"

The Herald Tribune. "When speculators stopped grabbing every parcel in sight and inventories of unsold homes began to rise in summer and fall 2005, anxiety crept into the regional psyche."

"Suddenly, it seemed possible that the laws of gravity still applied and that homes would no longer appreciate at 30 percent per year. Values might even drop."

"Many Southwest Floridians tried to put that thought out of their minds, preferring to live in denial in the hope that the market would rebound."

"'The fundamental thing that drives prices up is greed,' said Venice real estate broker and foreclosure specialist George Huhn. 'You start to see articles in which so-and-so gave up a job as a teacher and turned a $60,000 salary into $700,000 a year. Other people start to think they've got to get theirs before it's too late. But in the end, there's still plenty of real estate. There's just no one left to sell it to.'"

"'The news is not good,' said economist Paul Kasriel. Kasriel points to the enormous financial problems facing sub-prime lenders. 'Increased foreclosures means more houses will come on the market,' Kasriel said. 'But buyers who might have been able to buy those houses with sub-prime mortgages have been taken out of the chain.'"

"'The lawsuits are already popping out,' said Kasriel. 'It's a shotgun approach where everyone sues everyone else in the hope someone has money.'"

"It is basic supply-and-demand economics, said Don Atwell, an agent in Punta Gorda. 'When you have all this supply, dropping prices is the only way to jump-start demand.'"

"That does not mean going down in 'chicken steps -- a little reduction here and a little reduction there,' said agent Barbara Ackerman. 'If sellers do that, all they're doing is following the market. What they need to do is stand out like sunflowers in the weeds.'"

"The worry among some market experts is that no matter how much prices are reduced, demand for real estate will not recover until buyers are convinced that the market has bottomed out. 'No one buys in a down market,' said Garrick Newman, an agent in Bradenton, pointing to a real estate auction last month where property formerly owned by developer Michael Tringali was offered at the Sarasota-Bradenton Convention Center."

"'That summed it all up,' Newman said. 'There was a lot of sitting and no bidding. People weren't looking for deals. They were looking for steals.'"

"Huhn believes that buyers will not get comfortable with real estate again until 'there is blood in the streets.' By 'blood,' Huhn means more foreclosures, more builders going out of business, more bankers reporting losses, more developers, real estate agents and investors suing one another in an attempt to pass on the blame for their losses."

"Some are still in denial, but the prevailing emotion is moving toward fear, Huhn said. 'The F-word is definitely creeping in. If we were whistling past the graveyard a couple of months ago, we definitely know there are a lot of dead bodies buried in there now.'"

From Florida Today. "A wave of home mortgage foreclosures is sweeping across Brevard County, signaling a disastrous end to the local housing boom for those who could lose their homes. More than 200 local mortgages have been foreclosed on in each of the last four months, and thousands more are in danger of being foreclosed, records show."

"Many of the foreclosures and homes vulnerable to foreclosure are in Palm Bay and Viera -- two areas of Brevard County that have had the highest volumes of new-home construction in recent years."

"In Brevard County, there were 982 foreclosures from November through February, more than double the 377 foreclosures during the same four-month period a year earlier, according to data provided by Brevard County Clerk of Courts Scott Ellis. The figures include some commercial foreclosures, but the vast majority are residential."

"In addition, there are more than 5,600 local properties where the owners are at least two months behind in mortgage payments, according to RealtyTrac.com."

"'We're starting to see the beginning of the increase in foreclosures now,' said Gene Collins, the former president of the Melbourne Area Association of Realtors and a Realtor who has handled foreclosure sales for banks and others."

"If there is a marked downturn in the economy, 'this could be seen as the tip of the iceberg,' said David Brown, professor at the University of Florida's Department of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate."

"''We've adapted to what I call 'The Easy Society,' in that we made it easy for people to get into houses with submarginal credit. Since they had submarginal credit, that puts them in the sub-prime category, ripe for a product like the exotic mortgage or the junk loan, or optional adjustable-rate mortgage,' said Steve Srein, founder of People's First Financial Services of Melbourne."

"'The problem today is that the people were pushed into loans they really couldn't afford,' Srein said. 'The real estate people and the mortgage brokers are saying the borrowers knew what they were doing. But, really, it's the optional (adjustable-rate mortgages) that are the big culprit behind the whole problem.'"

"'If your habit is spending on lavish trips or spending on clothes, you need to cap the spending to keep your house. It's the wants versus the needs,' Srein said. The other factor is that, in recent years, housing prices have soared in Florida overall, Srein said, 'and the salaries have not.'"

"What is worrisome about the rise in foreclosures is that it's not tied to a general downturn in the economy, David Brown said."

"'You're getting a high level of defaults that are not associated with an economic downturn, people losing their jobs, things like that,' he said. 'It's probably troubling that there are these large number of defaults in this kind of environment.'"