The Palm Beach Post reports from Florida. "The buyers' remorse crowd keeps growing. Pre-construction buyers of the luxurious 2700 North Ocean Boulevard condominium being built on Singer Island...are making last-minute attempts to undo their million-dollar purchases just as the condo nears completion and closings are on the horizon. High-profile developer Dan Catalfumo is disinclined to let anyone out of the deal."

"'Bring it on,' Catalfumo said in an interview last week. 'I'll see them at closing. They're not getting out.'"

The Sun Sentinel from Florida. "Levitt and Sons of Fort Lauderdale became the nation's largest builder to file for bankruptcy as the housing market continues to crumble. The storied company filed for Chapter 11 protection from its creditors in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Broward County. It lists assets of less than $1 million and debts of more than $100 million."

"Angelo Palermo is renting an apartment in Pembroke Pines while waiting for his $380,000 house in Port St. Lucie to be finished. He isn't optimistic about recovering his $38,000 deposit."

"'My attorney told me it looked like they were going to go into bankruptcy,' Palermo said. 'But if they go into bankruptcy, I'm at the bottom of the list for collecting money.'"

"Three years ago, home builders held lotteries to deal with hordes of people, mostly short-term investors, overwhelming their sales centers. Today, with housing markets crashing, builders practically beg for buyers."

"'During the boom, you were developing strategies to manage demand,' said Jill DiDonna, a VP of Sunrise-based GL Homes. 'Now your whole modus operandi is trying to stimulate demand. It's come 180 degrees.'"

"Q: Can builders afford to keep offering deep discounts?"

"A: Buyers' psychology today is that they expect to get good deals. We just sold 40 homes in Vero Beach. We knocked anywhere from $60,000 to $100,000 off the price of the homes. If a house is selling for $300,000, and it cost you $250,000 to build, and you have to sell it for $225,000, at least you have some cash flow coming in. Something is better than nothing."

From Florida Today. "Mortgage foreclosure filings in Brevard County reached a new monthly record, with 590 in October, according to the Brevard County Clerk of Courts, which records foreclosure cases."

"The deluge brought the total for this year to 3,908 filings from January through October, more than double the 1,868 filings in all of last year, and more than triple the 1,144 filings in all of 2005, data from the Clerk of Courts office shows."

"Ritch Workman, president of the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers said the past housing price increases represented 'unsustainable growth.'"

The News Journal from Florida. "The inventory of unsold homes in the Escambia-Santa Rosa area remains at record highs. As of Nov. 1, there were some 10,000 dwellings for sale, counting all single-family houses, condos and townhomes on the two-county MLS and those for sale by owner."

"'What we're looking at is a huge inventory that's unprecedented for this area,' said Al Muller, president of Metro Market Trends. 'There are fewer buyers in the market, the speculators and investors are gone and people with poor credit are not buying. This tells me is that prices need to keep heading down.'"

The St Petersburg Times. "Mark Kowalick always knew that if he didn't like where he was working, he could drive down the street near his New Port Richey neighborhood and find another job. At 39, he has been pouring concrete about half his life. It's what he does."

"Or used to do. He has been laid off for nearly a year, a victim of the housing slump. And there's nothing down the street anymore."

"It's so bad, Kowalick said, that pawn shops have stopped buying the tools contractors use because they're overstocked, and some of his friends have been forced to sell their most prized possession: their pickup trucks."

"'Nobody talks about what's happening to us,' he said. 'It's unbelievable that I'm reduced to this. I used to own my own concrete business.'"

"On Wednesday, Kowalick applied for a job that is housing-related, sort of, as a cook at a local International House of Pancakes."

"'This is the first time since I was 12 that I haven't worked,' he said. 'Five years ago I could quit this morning and have job this afternoon. Now I don't even know anybody who's pouring concrete.'"

The Naples News from Florida. "At a time when a high county assessment of a home’s 'market value' can seem like rude contrast to the trends in the region’s real estate market, property owners have sent in a record 3,727 property value petitions."

"Frustration with the sagging market is one explanation Lee County Property Appraiser Ken Wilkinson has for why there has been a spike in the number of challenges to his office’s work this year."

"'It’s true the values are continuing to go down,' Wilkinson said, adding he’s seeing the steepest decline in the prices of vacant lots in the county."

"Bonita Springs resident Rhea Corrion made the trip to Fort Myers last month. In the county’s view, the vacant lot she and her husband own in the city’s downtown was worth more than $149,000. She doesn’t dispute that’s what many would like the land to be worth, she sees other lots listed for about that price."

"'But they’re not selling,' she said. 'The values should go up a little bit, not 81 percent.'"

The News Press from Florida. "Despite reduced tax rates, John Van Voorhis' 2007 taxes increased 4 percent because his property assessments spiked when speculators bought nearby property at high prices. The 2007 assessed value of his first duplex increased by 37 percent to $334,230; his second duplex’s fell 0.8 percent to $283,300; and his third duplex’s rose by 14 percent to $241,820."

"He said the property appraiser is not taking into account those speculators are trying to resell their property at lower prices than his assessed values. 'Now you tell me my assessment is fair market value,' he said."

"George Khoury bought a house in Fort Myers four years ago to escape Toronto winters. After seeing his 2007 property tax bill, he’s contemplating fleeing Florida. His taxes shot up 40 percent from last year, mainly because his assessment increased 47 percent, from $440,540 in 2006 to $647,380."

"If his assessment doesn’t go down, he will try to sell his house and leave. 'We’ll go to Arizona or South Carolina. There’s absolutely no reason to take this kind of abuse,' Khoury said. 'If I pass this around in Canada to the other Canadians who come down to Florida, it’s going to scare the living daylights out of them.'"

"Mary Middleton's been a real estate agent for 21 years, five years before becoming a licensed appraiser. A Fort Myers native , Middleton from her south Fort Myers home and has a staff of two other appraisers. It was late 2006 when the plunging residential market began to be felt at Middleton Appraisal, she said."

"'I've been doing this for 16 years and this year's the worst in all of those years,' Middleton said. 'That's because the schools were turning them out, 70 appraisers a week, so the market was flooded on top of that.'"

"Middleton believes appraisers who grossly inflated the value of homes they examined during the residential real estate explosion have given the profession a black eye. 'We're supposed to be protecting the lender, but I always say I'm here to protect the buyer,' she said. 'Let's say you're buying a house for $350,000, but it was really only worth $300.000. Wouldn't you be angry?'"

"Q: Why are appraisals receiving some of the blame for the prevalence of upside down loans?"

"A: Ultimately I think it's the lender. For instance, let's say the sales price was $300,000 and let's say the mortgage broker said can we get $360,000 because they don't want to have to put any money down. There were appraisers that could find that (additional value) and on top of that, there were lenders that accepted it. Even though the sales price was $300,000, they would still accept a sales price of $360,000."

"A house on paper, that's not built yet, these appraisers knowingly would use a home that's worth $50,000 more as a comp (comparison) instead of homes of equal value. So that's how they would get their values and we didn't to do that. We would just say we can't do that. So they, of course, made a lot more money, while we complained."

"It's the underwriters, the lenders. That was criminal for those lenders and underwriters, but they wanted those loans because they wanted to pass them off and make money from the secondary market."

"It does bug me when they blame the appraiser. But every lender has a blacklist of appraisers. Do you think they turn them in to the state? No way. They just don't use their appraisals anymore."

The Beaufort Gazette from South Carolina. "Beekman Webb put a classified advertisement in the newspaper a couple of weeks ago for a carpenter's assistant and 'had about 50 calls in three days.'"

"'I was just covered up, and I was the only ad in the paper at the time looking for carpentry help,' said Webb, who has his own Beaufort-based construction company. 'I had people from Hilton Head (Island) that told me they'd been in business for 15 years with a bunch of employees and now they're just looking for a job as a carpenter,' he said."

The Post & Courier from South Carolina. "Margaret and Warren Ostergard are ready to try something different. Their three-bedroom, upscale townhouse at The Albemarle in West Ashley, listed at $594,900, hasn't attracted much interest since it was put on the market a year ago."

"But the Ostergards, who work for Weichert Realtors-Dean-Kelby in Mount Pleasant, say being flexible and open to a different kind of transaction — a lease-option contract — could help them catch a buyer's eye."

"The fallout from today's real estate slowdown has opened a gap between buyers and sellers."

"Mortgage lenders have tightened their standards, cutting a portion of aspiring but riskier homebuyers out of the market because of their less-than-perfect credit scores. At the other end, many homeowners have had trouble selling their houses, leaving some with second-mortgage payments for other properties — some of them far from Charleston."

"For some buyers and sellers, one solution is a contract known in industry parlance as a 'lease to purchase option' agreement."

"The lease-option concept is a by-product of the boom years, when speculative investors acquired options to buy homes, waited for real estate values to appreciate and sold their options for a profit, said Rachel Lindsay, CEO of P&L Management Properties in Summerville."

"Since then, she said, the idea 'has been plagiarized and altered to meet a different kind of demand.'"