A report from Newszap Delaware. "Local homes staying on the market longer and for-sale signs advertising 'reduced prices' are clear indicators the housing boom of recent years is drawing to a close. 'The big party is over,' said Edward Hammond, a member of the Kent County Association of Realtors."

"Dee Hake DeMolen, president of the association, said the boom of the past few years was an anomaly and could have never lasted long term. 'It can’t continue,' she said. 'It is just a physical impossibility in our marketplace.'"

The Record from New Jersey. "Hoping to profit from a red-hot housing market at the Jersey Shore, Jamie Errico bought a cottage two blocks from the ocean in Bay Head in 2004. She tore it down and replaced it with a 4,600-square-foot Victorian, planning to flip the property."

"'A couple of years ago, anything on the Jersey Shore that was halfway decent was selling as fast as you could put it on the market,' Errico, of New York City, said recently."

"But the house has been for sale for nearly two years, though Errico has cut the price to $1.495 million, from $1.69 million. Errico recently decided to rent it out while she waits for a buyer."

"As summer draws to a close, it's clear that the real estate frenzy has ended at the Jersey Shore, with the leveling off of the wild price rises of the early part of this decade. 'Prices have come down a bit,' said Karen Symington of Re/Max Limited in Brick. 'The cost of housing just skyrocketed, and now we're at a point of correction.'"

"Statewide, house sales volume this year is running about 20 percent lower than in 2005. Prices at the Shore have fallen about 5 percent or less from their peaks in 2006, according to data from Realtors."

"Tony Belli, president of the Ocean County Association of Realtors and an agent in Lavallette, said condo sales seem to have been hurt more than single-family homes. For example, in Ocean County, condo sales this year are running at half the rate of 2005, and prices are down about 14 percent in that period."

"'It's not a bad market, it's a market that's trying to correct itself,' Symington said. 'History runs in cycles, and so does real estate. This is probably the best time in eight years for buyers. It truly, truly is a buyer's market.'"

"In Brielle, The Robertson Douglas Group dropped the price of its 18 waterfront town houses on the Manasquan River. The town houses went on the market with a starting price of $975,000; now they start at $825,000. Earlier, the developer had offered a boat as an incentive to buyers."

"Hovnanian Enterprises of Red Bank, the state's largest homebuilder, estimates that its Shore sales volume is down 30 percent to 40 percent from the peak in 2005. 'Our biggest challenge continues to be our prospective purchaser selling their existing home,' said Barry McCarron, president of Hovnanian's Coastal Division."

"Hovnanian has cut prices or added incentives to a number of its Shore communities, adding up to total discounts of 5 percent to 15 percent, depending on the location. And it has dropped plans for several developments it had planned to build in Monmouth and Ocean counties."

The Press of Atlantic City in New Jersey. "K. Hovnanian is holding its first-ever "nationwide" sales event this weekend. Through today, K. Hovnanian is offering discounts at all of its residential developments."

"A sampling of price reductions in the area includes: as much as $81,887 at Hidden Pines and Oak Manor in Egg Harbor Township; as much as $60,000 at Manors at Freedom Hills in Barnegat Township; as much as $106,609 at Tides at Seapoint in North Wildwood; as much as $51,000 at Four Seasons in Galloway Township; and $43,000 off the last home available at Four Seasons at Mirage in Barnegat."

"Michael Skea, VP of sales and marketing for the New Jersey-southern New York region, said K. Hovnanian discovered two things about the market in the past couple of months. One was that many buyers are selling their house first and then looking for a home they can move into within 90 to 120 days. The other is that pricing the homes correctly 'dramatically increased the number of prospects visiting a community.'"

"That led to the first companywide sale. 'It has taken quite a while to determine the right pricing for each community, but now we think that we're there,' Skea said. 'I believe the right pricing will drive this event.'"

"'In January and early February, there was a psychological malaise, and just when we were starting to overcome it, the subprime crisis arose almost simultaneously,' he said. 'Now we're finding that malaise starting to be overcome again, notwithstanding the number of stories about the terrible state of the housing industry.'"

"K. Hovnanian couldn't help contributing to such media coverage this week when it reported a quarterly loss of $80.5 million, having taken a charge of $108.6 million for land-deposit writeoffs and reductions in land values."

The Morning Call from Pennsylvania. "Buried deep among the multitude of numbers in the state Labor Department's monthly unemployment report recently was this fact: The Lehigh Valley's work force is stagnant."

"That's relatively shocking, considering the tremendous migration of people into the Lehigh Valley in recent years. That migration has been the main driver of the local economy, responsible in part for skyrocketing home prices, high consumer prices and the exploding number of restaurants, retailers and other service businesses that have cropped up."

"The sluggish work force growth may signal, though doesn't conclusively prove, that the en masse flocking of people to the Lehigh Valley from New Jersey, New York and the Philadelphia region has ended."

"The slowdown is something real estate agents have noticed for months. 'We have seen it in the trenches, that migration has slowed,' said Clay Mitman, president of an Easton agency that traditionally has had a large portion of clients moving from New Jersey."

"Slower housing markets outside the Valley are the primary reason, he said. 'Two years ago, if someone had to sell their house in New Jersey [to buy one in the Lehigh Valley], you didn't care because you knew it would take them three days. Now it could take three or six months, or not sell at all.'"

"The number of out-of-state home buyers might have started going down as early as summer 2006 when gas prices spiked, said Mark Molchany, president-elect of the Lehigh Valley Association of Realtors. 'When gas hit $3 a gallon last summer, it was like somebody closed a door,' he said, adding that repeated media reports about a slow housing market scared a lot of would-be sellers into staying put."

Bloomberg reports on New York. " The cost for 30-year fixed-rate jumbo mortgages, those exceeding $417,000, has increased more than one percentage point since March to about 7 percent, data compiled by Bankrate.com show. August rates were the highest since December 2001."

"Prices may start to drop in the New York City metropolitan area beginning in the fourth quarter of this year and continue falling 1 percent to 7 percent per quarter through 2008, according to estimates from economist Mark Zandi."

"Meghan Fajardo of New York City ran through two mortgage brokers and multiple lenders as interest rates rose to more than 7.25 percent from 6.25 percent for her $680,000 condominium in the Windsor Terrace section of Brooklyn, New York."

"Fajardo closed on the 1,100-square-foot apartment on Aug. 9, agreeing to a 30-year fixed-rate loan at 6.875 percent with terms that call for her to pay interest only for the first 10 years. She initially planned to pay down the principal too. In the end, that would have been too expensive."

"'It was a shock to me,' she said. 'I wasn't really following the market that well.'"

"Four business days after the loan closed, the same mortgage Fajardo got from Countrywide had a rate of more than 8.5 percent, said Robert Raush, her broker in Manhattan."

"In East Hampton, New York, real estate broker Diane Saatchi of the Corcoran Group just dropped the price on a four-bedroom classic 1910 house to $2.2 million from about $2.6 million. She had been trying to sell it for 10 months."

"'People are adjusting their dream prices back to reality,' said Saatchi. 'If they want to sell in this market, they have to drop the price.'"

The New York Times. "During the recent boom the best indicator of value became 'what houses are selling for' — another variation, in other words, on the greater-fool theory, which holds that commodities are worth only as much as someone else will pay for them and that someone (a greater fool) will always be willing to pay more than the last buyer."

"To anyone who shopped for a home in a booming metropolitan area over the past few years, though, this was also the defining conundrum of the era: an apartment or house couldn’t possibly be worth the stratospheric asking price — but then again, maybe it could. Wouldn’t that have to be true if six bidders were considering buying it?"

"In New York City, builders are finishing about 30,000 new units a year, which is one and a half times the rate at the start of the boom. Logic suggests that so much new housing, along with tighter credit markets, will dampen both supply and prices."

"My friend Jim, who lives in Brooklyn and whose house has appreciated to about seven times what he paid for it in 1994, recently told me about watching a house-hunting show on HGTV with his 10-year-old son. The episode featured a couple who had $435,000 to spend on a good-size house."

"My friend’s son shook his head. 'No way,' he said. 'That’s just wrong. You can’t get a house for $435,000.' Well, not in Manhattan or brownstone Brooklyn. At least not anymore. And at least not yet."