The Rocky Mountain News reports from Colorado. "The note left on the door to the house on Fulton Street was a plea to owners who no longer live there. 'Please repair the garage door,' read the note, dated Oct. 18. 'Please remove all outdoor storage, trash and debris from the alley.' It was written by a city code enforcement officer who tries to keep neighborhoods tidy. The property, an eyesore for months, was cleaned up shortly before Christmas."

"But others like it remain unkempt, dragging down property values in neighborhoods across the metro area. The foreclosed house is in the Del Mar neighborhood, one of the hardest hit by foreclosures. Through September, 82 of 100 houses sold in the previous 12 months in the neighborhood were either foreclosed properties or short sales, according to data compiled by Your Castle Real Estate."

"In Aurora, there were 3,387 foreclosures the first six months of this year, the city's Community Development Division reported."

"Through November, Aurora used a contractor more than 2,115 times to remove trash, weeds and do other needed fixes on properties, said Nancy Sheffield, director of neighborhood services."

"That's almost triple the number of such jobs - known as abatements - done in 2004, and 770 more than last year. While not all of the properties are foreclosed houses, the numbers have 'been increasing primarily because of the foreclosures,' Sheffield said."

"The vast number of foreclosures and the volume of paperwork that goes with them have overwhelmed lenders, whose first priority is reselling the homes, said Sunny Banka, a broker who owns Metro Brokers Sunny Homes."

"The drawn-out process to foreclose a home may also be a factor in why lenders don't maintain the houses they take back, said Chris Holbert, president of the Colorado Mortgage Lender Association."

"Holbert said sometimes lenders do not have ownership of the property - and the legal authority to do any maintenance - until weeks or months after the previous owner has left."

"'It's not their invoice to pay,' Holbert said about lenders. 'I guess it would be similar to if a dealership was to repossess a car, would they be responsible for parking tickets on that car?'"

MSNBC reports on Colorado. "The head of one of the nation’s largest homebuilders made headlines early this year by bucking his industry peers’ projections of a housing turnaround by spring and instead predicting the market would 'suck, all 12 months of the calendar year.'"

"Boy did he get it right. The housing market has gone from a 'correction' to a 'slump,' and as 2007 comes to a close, there are signs 2008 will get worse."

"Amid the predictions, sellers are sitting on the sidelines, hoping 2008 will bring more traffic, while potential home buyers try to time the bottom of the market."

"Cliff and Erika Stice of Castle Rock, Colo. have had their two-year-old stucco and stone ranch home on and off the market since February 2006. They’ve had 30 showings, just a handful of repeat lookers and no offers, despite cutting the price to $1.255 million from $1.35 million."

"'We really thought we would sell the house fairly quickly,' said Cliff Stice, a retired telecommunications and cable executive."

"Fortunately, the Stices are in no rush to sell. They won’t buy another house until theirs is under contract."

"'Our realtors think 2008 is going to be much better than 2007. If people are less scared to make a commitment then the market will start taking off again,' Stice said. 'Until then, it’s not a bad place to hang out.'"

The Arizona Republic. "As bad news goes, May 2006 initially seemed like a hiccup for the construction industry in Arizona. Up to then, the contracting industry was posting gaudy monthly sales growth, recording 30 percent more business for six straight months compared with the same time a year earlier."

"That May, the number slowed to 24 percent - a hiccup, surely."

"The same month, David Schweikert, Maricopa County treasurer at the time, declared the county's fiscal health 'the best I've probably seen it in my lifetime...Right now, the money is really flowing in.'"

"But looking back, Arizona's financial outlook already was changing."

"The tax-collection picture reflected in Arizona Department of Revenue records shows the summer of 2006 as the pivotal time when the state's economy downshifted from boom to its more troubled present. Construction growth saw a small rebound in June but had slowed to a trickle by December."

"The fate of a project like Elevation Chandler may have offered warning signs of the trouble to come. On May 9, 2006, the construction crane at the planned 10-story condominium near Chandler Fashion Center was removed from the unfinished site. Work there had stopped abruptly three weeks before."

"Today, 19 months later, it remains a hulking skeleton of concrete and steel."

"But, overall, single-family residential housing is the largest source of contracting revenue in Arizona, and its slowdown has been more dramatic. In the first nine months of this year, contracting sales on residential housing fell 10 percent. It represented a $675 million drop in business for contractors."

"'The market is flat stagnant,' said David Jones, president of the Arizona Contractors Association. 'We're hoping the residential sector will perk up in the third quarter of 2008.'"

"As 2007 ends, the economy is teetering on recession, if not fully immersed in one, depending on which economist you believe."

"The Southeast Valley is no exception, feeling the heat of the housing market meltdown and the credit crunch. In nearly every ZIP code in the Southeast Valley, the median home price fell on a percentage basis over the past year, according to Information Market. Among the hardest hit were Gilbert and Ahwatukee."

"Meanwhile, the number of Valley homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure grew by 566 percent, a result of the housing market's slowdown and rising interest rates on risky so-called sub-prime mortgages. In the Southeast Valley alone, lenders foreclosed on 1,543 homes."

The Las Vegas Sun from Nevada. "The winner of the latest installment of the reality TV show 'The Apprentice,' Stefanie Schaeffer, is facing a challenge that surpasses anything made for television."

"Schaeffer was recently installed as marketing director overseeing sales for Donald Trump's Vegas condo and hotel, set to soon open its first 64-story, 1,282-unit luxury tower. But real estate agents and analysts here say the timing couldn't be worse."

"High-rise luxury condo prices are way down in Las Vegas, reflecting local and national housing trends. The boom times of the past few years, when developers flamboyantly announced one high-rise project after another and talked of Las Vegas as the next Manhattan, ended with a thud this year."

"Local observers say that as Trump pushes to close on units, a reckoning may come for the still fairly new concept of luxury Vegas high-rises."

"The answer will hinge on whether the people who put down $10,000 deposits during the boom years will now be able to come up with financing for the units, priced from $700,000 to $7 million."

"'I'm worried about how many of those things are going to go up for sale, and are they going to linger out there, and are we going to get bad press,' said Realtor Don Kuhl. 'Hopefully we don't have a huge number of people in there trying to flip units because we don't have a strong enough market for that at the moment.'"

"Condo buyers aren't allowed to put their units up for sale until they close, and that can't happen until the building's opening, which is set for the spring but could happen as early as February."

"Kuhl and other local agents who deal in luxury condos report that an informal list of Trump reservers trying to unload units is already floating around - some estimate it reflects 30 percent of the tower. These agents believe many of the sellers won't be able to get the price they committed to paying for the unit and some may have to walk away from their deposits."

"'They thought they were going to flip them, and they don't want to be paying mortgage payments,' said Realtor Paul Murad, author of 'Manhattanizing Las Vegas.' 'Some of these investors are not going to be able to close.'"

"Murad estimates that 20 percent of potential buyers citywide are walking away from luxury condo deposits these days."

"According to a report released Friday by Restrepo Consulting, high- and midrise luxury condo sales through the first three quarters of 2007 were outpacing 2006 in the number of units sold, but median prices have fallen from about $1.03 million to $860,000, a drop of about 17 percent."

"Median hotel-condo unit prices were down in 2007 from $670,000 to $537,500, a nearly 20 percent drop."

"Restrepo Consulting also found that units were languishing for months on the resale market. MGM's condo-hotel, for example, had 124 units - 10 percent of its inventory - on the market an average of 117 days. Panorama Towers, a high-rise luxury condo project just west of the Strip, opened its second tower less than three months ago and is trying to resell about 10 percent of that, according to sales director Tony Preus."

"Five Panorama units are currently in foreclosure, according to RealtyTrac, each now worth several hundred thousand dollars less than what the owners paid for them."

"According to a recent report by Applied Analysis, 13,000 luxury condos are in planning or under construction in the Las Vegas Valley, including 8,400 under construction on or around the Strip."

"'It's cyclical,' said Preus, of the Panorama. 'You can't panic. People who invest are pretty savvy, and they understand that things go up, they go back down, and they go back up again. What they have is a piece of property that is very, very valuable.'"

In Business Las Vegas from Nevada. "More midrise condo projects in Las Vegas have been postponed as part of the continuing shakeout of the housing industry."

"The number of condo units suspended jumped 21 percent in the third quarter from 3,877 to 4,688, according to the latest numbers released by Applied Analysis."

"With financing harder to come by for developers, there were more than 20,000 units suspended or canceled through the end of the third quarter. There were more than 14,000 units postponed or canceled at the end of the first quarter."

"Most of the attention over the past year has been on the cancellation of high-rise projects on the Strip, but more affordable midrise projects of four to nine stories away from the glamour of Las Vegas Boulevard were supposed to play a greater role because of the high cost of land and need for greater densities."

"The fourth-quarter report is expected to show additional cancellations and the suspension of midrise projects such as Spa Lofts, 147 units planned in the southwest valley, analysts said."

"'There is a lot of competition in the marketplace, and it is difficult for buyers to be willing to pay the premium for a project when there are 27,000 resale units on the market today,' Applied Analysis Principal Brian Gordon said."

"The numbers don't reflect the the demise of the midrise condo market in Las Vegas but simply a delay of what will become a more important part of the housing market, said Steve Bottfeld, executive VP of Marketing Solutions."

"Bottfeld said the suspensions and cancellations were prompted by ill-advised projects that were overpriced, by lousy floor plans that were either too small or didn't offer upscale features and by developers who couldn't retain prospective buyers before contracts were written. Developers need to sell 50 percent to 70 percent of their units to obtain construction loans."

"'You add in problems with (the credit crunch), foreclosures and consumer confidence, and you have a recipe for a tough time,' Bottfeld said. 'Somewhere along the line people will say there is not enough demand or the market is not ready for it, but that's not the case.'"

"At the end of the third quarter, there were 854 luxury condos on the market, up 19 percent from the second quarter. The units had an average asking price of $830,800."

"Forty-six percent of those units are high-rise residential, 36.4 percent were condo-hotel units and 17.3 percent were midrise residential."