The New York Times reports on Florida. "A Florida couple, Scott and Deanne Hopp, bought and sold house after house, and seem to have done well at it for a time. They specialized in buying houses with less than no money down, borrowing more cash than they actually had to pay. One of their homes caused a scandal when it was featured in the local newspaper as being used for sex parties promoted on the Internet."

"The Hopps protested that was not their fault, that a tenant had organized the parties without their knowledge. Simply renting out the house was a violation of the terms of their mortgage, but the lender, Countrywide Financial, evidently did not notice."

"A month after the scandal broke, it gave the couple another million-dollar loan to buy a house four miles away. Now both of those loans have gone into foreclosure, and so have three others that were made by other lenders on other homes."

"The total judgments against the Hopps come to $3.9 million, and that does not include hundreds of thousands of dollars in second mortgages that apparently were not worth trying to collect. The houses are selling - if they are selling at all - for far less than the amounts owed."

"The house with the sex parties in Holmes Beach, provides an example of the ways the Hopps were able to finance their purchases - and of how far Florida real estate values have fallen."

"They bought the home in early 2004 for $710,000, borrowing $829,300. After a few new loans and a refinancing, they had a $980,000 first mortgage and a $70,000 second mortgage from Countrywide. The first loan was a negative amortization loan, and by the time the loan went into default they owed $1.04 million. Add in the fees and back interest, and the total came to $1.1 million."

"The securitization records showed that $1.1 million was just 70 percent of the house's appraised value, but that appraisal proved to be a little high. Countrywide has been trying to sell it for months, at ever lower prices."

'The latest offering price is $729,900, but if no one offers that much the house is to be auctioned next month, with a minimum bid of $369,000."

"It was Ms. Leder, a former resident of Holmes Beach, who first noticed the home on Countrywide's Web site and has followed its descending asking price for months."

"'It reminds me when I was a cub reporter at The Bradenton Herald in the early '90s, chasing similar deals,' she said. 'The names of the banks were different then and most of them have long since closed down. But the daisy chain of creatively financed sketchy deals remains eerily similar.'"

The Gasparilla Gazette. "In a phone interview, Lee County Property Appraiser Ken Wilkinson said said the year over year drop in values countywide is a rare event. 'It's the first time in my history, which is over 28 years,' he said, adding that he is not sure when the last time was that there was a decline in Lee County. 'But I would guess that it hasn't happened since the Depression.'"

"While Lee County was down by 12.36 percent, property values across Cape Coral dropped for the second straight year, falling more than 25 percent in 2007. Cape Coral lost 26.4 percent of its just value, meaning the city saw more than $7.3 billion of its value dissipate."

"The Cape's drop was the most severe in the area though Lehigh Acres had a nearly comparable decline, losing about 23 percent of its value. 'Those were the areas where most of the markets were based upon, in my opinion, greed and speculation,' Wilkinson said. 'Those who went up the farthest will come down the farthest.'"

"Property owners should be prepared for a similar decline next year, according to Wilkinson. He pointed to the massive rise in residential short sales that are moving homes off of the market at bargain prices."

"Unlike foreclosures, short sales are considered arm's length transactions and would be used in the formula to determine real property values."

"'Realtors are going to be happier this year because there are going to be more sales. But the majority of those are going to be short sales,' Wilkinson said. 'Once that becomes the market, we use them obviously.'"

From Tampa Bay 10. "Along a seemingly unending line of perfectly manicured lawns in a New Tampa golf course community, the eye stops on a house that is conspicuously out-of-place. In the front yard, a Trojan condom box sits undisturbed in the midst of a mangled mess of weeds. A backyard pool is green with algae and muck, and a rotting wood chair bobs near one end."

"On the front door of the house, a white piece of paper flails in the breeze. On it, there is a stamp from a Hillsborough County code enforcement board. This house is a foreclosure."

"Bob Jester has lived next to a foreclosure eyesore in Inverness for the last few years. 'I'm just disgusted,' he said. 'The inside of it's just been completely destroyed. The toilets are ripped up. [The] electrical is ripped up. There's [sic] holes all over the wall. Feces, garbage.'"

"When the backyard swimming pool became overgrown with algae and there were no fences to keep neighborhood kids out, Jester took it upon himself to figure out who the owner was. And his suspicions were right. The house had been repossessed by a mortgage company in California."

"In Hillsborough County, there are about 400 new foreclosure filings each week."

"Oftentimes, trash, piles of newspapers, overgrown lawns and algae-ridden pools sit untouched for months as a house goes through foreclosure. 'It's an attractive nuisance to children. [I] guarantee kids are the first who will know there's an abandoned house in the neighborhood,' said Hillsborough County code enforcement manager Jim Blinck."

The St Petersburg Times. "The housing downturn continues to crush Florida bankers: Overdue loans, mostly real estate related, have nearly quadrupled the past year in the Sunshine State."

"If that were not enough, the state's lenders have unusually low cash reserves to protect against mortgage defaults. And 41 percent of Florida-chartered banks were unprofitable the first three months of this year. That's twice the number of banks that bled red ink last year."

"It's not just problem home mortgages, but also developers defaulting on loans used to buy land and finance condominium towers. 'We're still on the downside of the curve. We've not reached a bottom,' Miami banking expert Ken Thomas said."

From WESH.com. "Like so many Central Florida communities, MetroWest has seen its share of foreclosures. But the Hamptons subdivision has taken an unusually hard blow."

"Residents estimated that there are well over 100 foreclosed homes. The homeowners' association still keeps things looking nice, but on every street sit empty condominiums and townhomes."

"Ann Samball, a Realtor who bought a condo in the Hamptons two years ago as an investment, is riding out the tough market by renting it out. She said she believes that so many buyers in the Hamptons are in trouble because they didn't plan ahead."

"'I truly believe that was a really hot property, especially for investors, and people bought into them thinking they were going to flip it and not planning for something to happen such as the market to change as it did,' said Samball."

The Daily Business Review. "Investors interested in buying distressed properties are increasingly using a different tactic to purchase desirable assets at a deep discount - buying the defaulted mortgage."

"Investors are making an end-run around owners, buying mortgages on well-located commercial and residential properties, foreclosing and taking ownership of projects some lenders are increasingly desperate to unload."

"'They are going to the mortgage companies and asking to purchase their nonconforming loans for 50 to 60 cents on the dollar. Sometimes even less,' said David Serle, broker in Boca Raton. 'They then package these loans and foreclose on the properties. Now they have homes 40 percent to 50 percent below market value. They fix them up, and sell them for a profit.'"

"Ultimately, the size of the buyer's discount is tied to the seller's motivation and the desirability of the properties in the debt package, said Ron Kriss, a real estate attorney with Akerman Senterfitt in Miami."

"'Everything is supply and demand,' Kriss said. 'Some of them are very nice properties and some are garbage.'"

"The best bet for buyers is to target banks with the highest rate of nonperforming loans, burgeoning real estate-owned property portfolios and concerns about liquidity and potential regulatory issues."

"'That's a seller that's going to be very highly motivated,' Kriss said."

"As home foreclosure cases piled up in his court, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge David C. Miller began to notice more affidavits from mortgage lenders stating they couldn't locate the borrowers."

"'The ones that caught my attention very early on were the ones that said they didn't have driver's license information or they didn't have employment information for the borrower,' the judge said in an interview."

"'Did someone just walk in off the street and say, 'Gimme money?' the judge asked sarcastically. 'I don't think that's possible.'"

"Increasingly, banks are struggling to locate defendants to serve them with formal notices. Whether the banks are performing their due diligence to find the defendants or whether the defendants are being evasive is anyone's guess."

"Attorneys representing Countrywide, a lender with thousands of mortgages in South Florida, cited a blanket corporate policy against commenting on foreclosure matters. Contacted directly, Countrywide officials also declined comment."

"Officials with Washington Mutual, another big mortgage lender, deferred comment to the company's Miami-based public relations staff. They deferred comment to the company's national staff, who responded by e-mail that they had no comment."

The Seminole Voice. "Is the U.S. in a recession? Not even economist Sean Snaith can answer that question yet. 'People ask me and I tell them the truth: I don't know,' said Snaith, the director of the Institute of Economic Competitiveness for the University of Central Florida."

"One of the factors ailing the economy is the housing market, which had been described as a bubble that popped. Snaith said he did not think the market was a bubble, and after periods of sleeplessness and watching the Food Network, he came up with a metaphor he was comfortable with: The market is a soufflé."

"The soufflé recipe called for 77 million baby boomers, historically low mortgage rates, innovations in financial markets, low unemployment rates, strong growth in personal income, and a pinch of speculation, he said."

"These ingredients came together to make the perfect soufflé, rising high in the 'preheated' economy until some ingredients started to fall out."

"'We had this incredible convergence of real events - all the ingredients were there and they came together in just the right way, in a way we'll never see again in our lifetime, quite frankly,' he said."

The Star Banner. "The economy might or might not be in a recession, but it's not likely to get much better for the next 12 to 18 months, a leading economist said Wednesday."

"'We don't anticipate getting back [to stronger growth] until 2010,' Snaith said. 'The housing bust has been compounded by the credit crunch. It takes time to get that confidence back.'"

"The year started on a 'dismal, sour' note, he said. 'There was no silver lining in any of those clouds.'"

"'We've got a tough situation ahead,' Snaith said. He later added that home prices nationwide won't return to the prices seen in the 2004-2006 boom. 'We'll never see the levels that we saw during the housing boom,' he said."

"He described home prices as a 'souffle,' not a bursting bubble. 'There's no happy ending for a bubble,' Snaith said. 'A souffle, if all the ingredients are in place, does not have to go flat.'"

The Naples News. "Realtors, property owners and independent property appraisers might be turning blue over recent news that Collier County's property base has decreased by an average of 4 percent."

"But they're not upset for the same reasons they've expressed in the past: reports that the Naples market was one of the most overpriced in the nation."

'Now, they're screaming that the 4 percent decrease in value doesn't come close to representing the fast and vast decline in property value."

"'How can this be? Down only 4 percent?' asked local property appraiser and property tax agent Donald J. Ward, who said he's been involved in the Naples-area real estate market for 14 years. 'The Dec. 27, 2007, issue of the Wall Street Journal reports a study showing Naples ... as the fifth-worst declining market in the country.'"

"'And these guys show only 4 percent? That's only a little shy of a perfectly stable (market). In some areas of our county, values are down 50 percent or more, and I have the qualifications and documentation to prove my numbers,' he said."

"Ward contends that his own home has decreased in value by 50 percent, and his appraisal business has decreased by 70 percent due to the horribly ailing real estate market."

"'They are saying that our values went up 7 percent in 2006 and only down 4 percent in 2007. That would be a stable market, meanwhile, there have been over 2,000 foreclosure filings so far in 2008,' Ward said. 'Myself and everyone I know - having anything to do with real estate - just can't hang in there anymore.'"

"'If you own property in Naples Park, Golden Gate, Golden Gate Estates, Marco Island, and many other areas of Collier County, values are down 40 to 60 percent, not 4 percent,' Ward said."

"'The property owners of Collier County are getting robbed, and many of us can't even pay our bills to begin with, due to the crumbled real estate and construction market,' Ward said."

"He is so incensed that he started a new local organization called Coalition Against Properties Unjust Taxation."