The Telegraph reports on Colorado. "For Cathy Busby, May 1 marked a personal 'Mayday!' as she was sucked into the housing crisis sweeping the United States. On Tuesday, she went into arrears on her mortgage after her monthly repayments soared by 40 per cent. The hospital administrator will lose the three-bedroom home in the Denver suburb of Montebello that she bought 11 years ago, unless she can reach a deal with her lender."

"'It's a terrible thought that I could lose it all,' she said on the first day that she failed to pay her interest-only-mortgage."

"These western states witnessed a decade-long boom in house prices, fuelled by their popularity as places to live. 'Folks thought that prices would rise indefinitely,' said Tom Rooney, a Denver property entrepreneur. 'It seemed like a good bet, but they got it wrong.'"

"Two years ago, Miss Busby took out a re-finance mortgage to cover her existing car, home and student loans. She borrowed $170,000, the value of her home, at an interest rate of 7.6 per cent (or $1,076 a month)."

"She knew that rate would increase after two years, but planned to take out another loan at that point to avoid the extra charges. However, when she had her house revalued a few months ago, it was worth $125,000, falling with the slowdown in the market."

"Unable to refinance the original loan, she must now pay a higher rate of interest, 10.6 per cent, which means payments of $1,501 a month, a $425 increase. 'With my other outgoings, I can't afford that,' said Miss Busby, a divorcée who earns $4,000 a month before tax."

"For other Montebello residents, such as the family that walked away from their debts and left the house next to Miss Busby empty, it is already too late. The same is probably true for Harvey Ryan, who built his home 32 years ago. 'It breaks my heart,' said Mr Ryan, who suffers from dementia."

"He took a loan of $115,000 four years ago and now his home is scheduled to be sold at auction this month as he cannot meet the monthly charges of $1,052, nearly half his disability income and pension."

The Denver Post. "Hundreds of thousands of home valuation notices are hitting mailboxes across the state, leaving some homeowners wondering what county assessors see that they don't."

"County assessments show home values rising on average anywhere from 3 percent in Adams County to about 11 percent in Boulder County over a two-year period ending June 30, 2006."

"By contrast, Realtor tallies and other counts show anemic, if not declining, home prices, with the typical metro home now taking 119 days to sell and metro Denver foreclosures rising at a pace of 30 percent a year."

"For the current cycle, the 18-month time frame stretched from Jan. 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006, when the market was stronger than it is now. 'Our value is approximately one year old,' Arapahoe County assessor Corbin Sakdol said. 'During that time period, the market was possibly better than it is today.'"

"Many areas saw declines, triggering something Adams County assessor Gil Reyes thought he'd never see, homeowners protesting fallen property values. That typically means lower taxes, but it isn't good news for borrowers desperate to refinance out of adjustable-rate loans on homes they paid too much to purchase."

"'We have received a lot of phone calls from people wanting to know about why their value went down. A lady filed an appeal because she was upset she had lost equity,' he said."

The Rocky Mountain News. "The median price of a Denver area single-family home was $248,000 last month, down slightly from $250,000 in April 2006."

"Mic Ortega, a broker in Lakewood, said a number of his clients gave up selling their homes in January, February and March because the weather was so bad but are sprucing them up to put them on the market."

"Broker associate Connie Telfer noted that she and her husband recently bought two homes as investments through short sales, where the lender takes less than the full amount on the loan on a house facing foreclosure."

"'It's a perfect time to buy if you have money to invest,' Telfer said."

The Greeley Tribune. "Privacy, these days, is harder to come by...as Greeley recovers from an unprecedented growth boom that made it, along with the rest of Weld County, one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country, according to the U.S. Census Bureau."

"'Everywhere you look,' Joyce Warehime said, 'it's houses.'"

"Even when the boom hit Fort Collins and Loveland, Greeley and other areas, including Windsor, lagged behind, and city officials were anxious for the growth. They wanted it. They practically begged for it."

"City officials began to do little dances when the growth rate, measured by planners on how many new housing units are added, reached 2 percent in 1995. In 1997, it hit 3 percent. Now 3 percent is considered a robust rate, a rate that means a ton of building activity and new homes are popping up everywhere. After a couple decades of never reaching 2 percent, Greeley reached at least 3 percent six of the next eight years."

"'It used to be slow in the wintertime, and so you'd get some other projects done,' Greeley Planning office director Greg Flebbe said. 'It hasn't been that way for 10 years.'"

"An voter growth initiative, Amendment 24, helped open the floodgates. The fear of 'get it while it's hot' created what planners called the great land grab of 2000. Cities in northern Colorado grabbed as much land as they could. Cities threatened legal action against each other, including Evans against Greeley over a parcel of land."

"'We annexed more that year than had been annexed in the previous 15,' said Becky Safarik, a planning office assistant."

"Once that land was available, developers moved to put homes on it before others did, meaning many were eager to move as quickly as they could on it."

"The boom has ended, at least in Greeley, where the growth didn't even reach 1 percent in 2006. Half-empty subdivisions out west are more common than planners would like these days, and yet developers are pushing Greeley's western border."

"Empty lots that are building-permit ready, meaning you could stick a home on it tomorrow, number into more than 2,500. That's generally at least 10 years of inventory, Flebbe said, and that number doesn't take into account all the vacant homes from foreclosures or homes that are up for resale."