The Boston Globe reports from Massachusetts. "The Massachusetts housing market showed signs of bumping along the bottom of a year long slump as it heads into the crucial spring season. Prices for single-family homes sold in February declined between 4 percent and 5 percent from February 2006, according to two different reports released yesterday by real estate interests."

"Conditions favored buyers. 'People are looking for good deals,' said Ken Maddeford, an agent in Chelsea. Maddeford, who has worked in Chelsea real estate for 28 years, including during the early-1990s real estate bust, said he believes the state's housing market won't bounce back quickly from the slump because too many sellers are refusing to drop their prices."

"'It's going to take time to correct,' he said, because 'the numbers just don't make sense right now.'"

"Currently, there are 45,193 single-family homes and condos on the market in Massachusetts, a year's worth of inventory. Another wild card: Increasingly both borrowers and lenders in the subprime mortgage market are in financial trouble. Foreclosures in the state are increasing rapidly, while some lenders are also experiencing financial hardship or capital problems."

"A record 15,000 Massachusetts homeowners received foreclosure notices from lenders last year. In the final quarter of 2006, 4 percent of Massachusetts borrowers with subprime loans had received foreclosure notices from their lenders, compared with less than 1.5 percent of borrowers of all other types of loans."

"'If a couple of these private lenders go down, it's a damper on the whole economy,' said Alan Pasnik, a real estate analyst for Warren Group. 'People get nervous about the whole banking system,' he said."

The Boston Herald. "The market is readjusting and sellers are slowly starting to lower prices as buyers push for discounts, said Wellesley College economist and nationally respected housing expert Chip Case."

"But Case believes the market still has more settling to do, enough so that it may be next spring before the market finally stabilizes. 'The market is headed towards stabilization,' Case noted. 'I think it will take a year before we get a real sense of where it will end up.'"

"At the current sales pace this represents approximately 12.3 months of supply. On a month-to-month basis, the average months of supply went up from 10.7 months of supply in January 2007. Residential properties stayed on the market an average of 148 days in February 2007 compared to an average of 115 days in February 2006."

"'While February sales gains compared to the same time last year were more modest than those we reported for January, we continue to head in the right direction,' said MAR President Doug Azarian."

"Timothy Warren Jr., CEO of the Warren Group, offered his perspective of the housing market in a statement. 'Although the number of sales fell in February, the relatively low decrease shows more of a leveling out in the Massachusetts home market,' he said. 'Sales decreased by double-digit percentages during much of 2006, so a decrease of only 1.4 percent could be an indication of some stabilization in the market.'"

"'But recent difficulties in the subprime mortgage market could spell trouble down the road. Mortgage lenders may react by tightening qualifications for mortgages, making it more difficult for some to buy homes. That means the Massachusetts housing market is probably not yet out of the woods,' he said."

The Hartford Courant from Connecticut. "Bushnell Tower has struggled during the past year through a sort of identity crisis. It faced what it has really never faced before: competition."

"During the past year, housing options have exploded in the city, from the upscale townhouse condominiums at Goodwin Estates near Elizabeth Park to the downtown Metropolitan condos."

"Bushnell Tower has not been unscathed. Demand for its high-end rentals, with monthly rents of $2,000 or more, have plummeted. Almost 60 of the building's 176 units are rentals; the individual owners have had to work harder to find tenants and, in some cases, have updated the units or reduced rents, local real estate agents said."

"'The rental market here is pretty much dead,' said Becky Koladis, an agent who handles rentals and sales in the building. 'Just recently, I lost a rental to Hartford 21. It's very hard to compete with brand-new.'"

"A one-bedroom unit that was listed for $190,000 in January, for instance, sold in one day for $180,000. And last month, a two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit that was listed for $299,900 sold in four days for $264,000."

Bloomberg reports from Rhode Island. "Rolando Ruiz and Stephanie Rodrigues telephoned their mortgage lender two weeks ago and offered to hand over the keys to their three-bedroom house in Providence, Rhode Island. They lost their jobs and haven't made a loan payment since January."

"'I told the bank to come get the keys and just let me know when we need to be out, but they said why not put it up for sale and we might be able to work something out,' said Rodrigues, the 22-year-old mother of two girls."

"Homeowners such as the Rhode Island couple are finding their mortgage companies eager to accept a sale price that falls short of a property's loan balance, a so-called mortgage short sale. The number of U.S. loans entering foreclosure reached an all-time high in the fourth quarter, according to the Washington-based Mortgage Bankers Association."

"'Banks don't want to be real estate managers,' said Doug Duncan, chief economist of the mortgage association. 'The fact that delinquencies are rising means we're going to see more pre- foreclosure sales.'"

"Almost 5 percent of U.S. mortgages had payments overdue by 30 days or more at the end of last year, the highest since 2003, Duncan said. No one tracks or estimates the number of borrowers who avoid foreclosure with a short sale, according to Duncan and David Berson, chief economist of Washington-based Fannie Mae, the largest buyer of mortgages. There's ample evidence that the number is increasing, they said."

"'Clearly it's happening and the numbers are rising,' Berson said. 'What we need to know to be concerned is how it compares to the last cycle, but no one tracks that.'"

"Ruiz and Rodrigues paid $195,000 a year ago for an eight-room house and spent about $12,000 renovating it. They found they couldn't recoup the money they put into the property because real estate values in Providence had fallen. The city's median selling price declined 1.1 percent in the fourth quarter to $291,300 from $294,400 a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors."

"'If the market had kept rising, we would have been fine because we could have easily sold for a profit when we lost our jobs,' said Rodrigues. 'Now, we're in a jam.'"