The Concord Monitor reports from New Hampshire. "When Louise and Bob Cloutier walked into their dream home on Buck Street in Pembroke, there was an old mattress in the living room and mold lining the insulation on the front-porch windows. The couple got the deal from Bert Cox, a real estate investor in Concord who bought the home for $100,000 from someone facing foreclosure."

"The previous owner owed nearly $240,000 on the mortgage and simply could not pay it back. Cox persuaded the bank to let him buy it for $100,000 and let the borrowers walk away, rather than foreclosing on the property and ruining their credit."

"'The truth is, the house wouldn't have brought $50,000 at a foreclosure auction,' he said."

"Just a few years ago, when houses appreciated overnight and sold within days, many investors bought inexpensive houses, hired a crew to fix them up as quickly as possible, and resold them for more money than they had paid. Now, Cox said, many of the good deals are bank-owned properties that have been foreclosed on."

"A successful short sale can require hours on the phone with a mortgage lender. An investor must demonstrate to the bank that the homeowner can't pay back his mortgage, that there is a buyer lined up, and that the house is worth what the buyer is offering."

"'It's amazing that you'll go in to see someone, and they're quite happy to walk away from their house,' said Richard Dale-Mesaros, an investor from Campton. 'Usually, the main goal is to be able to get out from under their house without having to bring money to the closing, and to repair their credit.'"

The Newburyport News from Massachusetts. "While each new month seems to paint a grimmer picture of the Bay State's real estate market, Greater Newburyport is bucking the trend and faring better than average. Longtime local agent Jerry Lischke says the sky is not falling as much as confusing data and misleading numbers point in that direction."

"'Beware of narrow statistics. Their basis will always be misleading if you take a snapshot of one month,' Lischke said. 'This is housing. In the years between 1996 and 2005, people played the real estate market like a speculative venture. It's not, it's long-term capital.'"

"Lischke said the monthly release of the latest trends reflecting 'normal' transactions only helps the banks, which do not want any of the loans they have written to be labeled as 'bad,' and the assessors, who use the data to make homes look more valuable, therefore, charging more taxes for a city or town."

"'It's just inaccurate comparing anything from 2007 to 2008,' Lischke said."

The Telegram from Massachusetts. "New England's economy will see slow growth in the second half of the year, but will lag behind the nation as a whole due to the ongoing housing slump and slower job growth and per capita income growth. That was the forecast given by a panel of economists and speakers at yesterday's New England Economic Partnership's Spring Economic Outlook Conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston."

"'The expectations in the housing market is that it will not stabilize until the second half of 2009, and we won't see any state with housing prices where they were at their peak, in 2006, at any time in the forecast,' said Ross Gittell, an economics professor at the University of New Hampshire."

"'This is actually the largest peak-to-trough decline in housing starts to occur in nearly 50 years,' said Eric S. Rosengren, the bank's CEO."

"Particularly hard-hit by the foreclosure situation is the multifamily market, he said. In 2006 and 2007, multifamily properties accounted for 28.4 percent of the foreclosures, even though they constituted only 10.8 percent of the residential purchases since 1990, he said."

The Associated Press on Massachusetts. "When Osman and Rose Bangura bought a two-family home three years ago at the peak of a housing boom, they saw a good investment in the $400,000 Colonial."

"For a couple years, they lived upstairs while rent from a downstairs tenant helped cut hundreds of dollars off the monthly payment."

"But, like many owners of southern New England's nearly 320,000 two- and three-family homes, the Banguras ran into trouble. Their monthly payment on a pair of adjustable rate mortgages jumped from about $2,900 last summer to nearly $4,200 - out of reach for a couple with $50,000 in annual income, supplemented by $1,150 in monthly rent from their tenant, a single mother of two children."

"'We are praying we will be able to keep it until the home crisis starts getting better, and maybe we'll be able to refinance the loans,' said Osman Bangura, who juggles two jobs and has managed to stave off foreclosure so far with the help of a local nonprofit."

"Massachusetts, home to 220,000 two-families and three-families often known as 'triple-deckers,' has seen the steepest decline among the three southern New England states where such homes make up significant portions of the overall housing stock."

"Last year, more of those homes in Massachusetts had foreclosure petitions filed against their owners than were sold."

"And while sales of single-family homes in New England's most populous state fell 10 percent last year, two-family home sales dropped 35 percent, and an even sharper 43 percent for three-families."

The Boston Herald from Massachusetts. "An Old Town Trolley gave prospective home buyers a first look at what may be their next homes yesterday during a sightseeing tour of foreclosed properties in Dorchester and Roxbury that city officials want to restore to life."

"The Department of Neighborhood Development sponsored the trolley tour, which visited 47 properties on 29 streets, including condo units, single, two- and three-family homes and mixed-use buildings."

"'What happened in the past is that people wanted to buy houses, they were so anxious to buy a home they got bad mortgages, bad advice and what this is all about is giving good advice and helping them through the process,' said Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who greeted prospective home buyers aboard the trolley before it departed from City Hall Plaza."

"This is awesome,' said Mezfin Clary of Mattapan. 'I'm a first-time home buyer and I'd like to have something that I can live in and supplement my income.'"

Bloomberg on New York. "The foreclosure tour, mobile proof of the U.S. housing bust, has rolled into the New York City market. For $75, prospective buyers on the Long Island version last month got velour banquettes, a supply of potato chips and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and visits to eight foreclosed homes, with a general contractor and home inspector in tow."

"The white bus pulled up to a small home in East Meadow, Long Island. The driveway was cracked, and the vinyl siding sagged. 'You have some mold issues; you can definitely assume some water issues,' said Dean Miller, a broker on the tour. Then again, he said, the asking price for the 1951 Cape Cod was $312,900, down from $457,101 in February."

"Foreclosures are scattered across otherwise healthy neighborhoods, offering New Yorkers a chance to move up to a house they wouldn't ordinarily be able to afford. The East Meadow home is a 45- minute commute from Manhattan."

"Some of the tourists said they'd be ready to buy the same day. 'If the right house comes along, you really don't need 20 days -- at the right price,' said Brian Cacioppo, a 24-year-old salesman shopping for his first home with Courtnie Harrison, 28. Buying a foreclosed home could give them some cash for improvements, he said."

"'With a foreclosure, it's selling for lower than it's worth and the equity is already in the house,' Cacioppo said."

"Prices are still high, said Liliana Martinovich, who wants to move closer to her son's school in Garden City. She said she'll wait for prices to fall further before buying."

"'It seems like it's going to get worse before it gets better with all these Wall Street layoffs,' said Melissa Cohn, president of Manhattan Mortgages, a mortgage broker active in Long Island. New York City, where financial services are the largest private employer, expects to lose 59,000 jobs by the middle of next year, according to the City's Independent Budget Office."

The New York Times. "It seemed somehow fitting that a recent tour of foreclosed homes in Nassau County was held on a bus that, with leopard-print sofas, a wood- and mirror-paneled ceiling and a wet bar, looked as if it was headed for Atlantic City rather than for New Hyde Park."

"Many of those who had lost ownership of homes on the tour route may well have gambled on rising real estate values."

"'It's hard to believe that someone paid more than $500,000 for this house just a couple of years ago,' said Joan Toomey, a passenger on the tour, about the first house on the tour, on Bedford Avenue in New Hyde Park."

"The house sold for $550,000 in 2006, according to information provided to passengers by David Farrell, owner of the Mineola real estate firm where the tour started. The asking price for the house, which is owned by the U.S. Bank National Association, a subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp of Cincinnati, is $320,000."

"When prices were rising, 'people thought it was going to stay like that forever, and it didn't,' said Connie Lassandro, the director of housing and homeless services in Nassau County, which runs a counseling program for people facing foreclosure. 'The rug was pulled out from under them.'"

"In Nassau in April, there were 502 foreclosure filings, more than double the number in April 2007, according to RealtyTrac. In Suffolk County, foreclosure filings increased by 43 percent, to 734, compared with April of last year."

The Buffalo News from New York. "Bankers are cautioning state lawmakers and regulators not to go too far in passing legislation to address the mortgage crisis and lending abuses, lest they unwittingly increase the cost of borrowing for consumers."

"'We're worried there will be legislation that will make it more difficult and more expensive to extend credit in New York state,' said Mark Czarnecki, president of M&T Bank Corp."

"In particular, they're not objecting to the imposition of new requirements or the prohibition of certain practices on so-called 'non-traditional' mortgage loans - such as high-cost subprime loans to borrowers with bad credit."

"But they are concerned about how those loans are defined, to make sure traditional prime loans aren't accidentally included if the threshold is set too low."

"Also, they are firmly against a suggested one-year moratorium on foreclosures. That bill passed the Assembly early this month, and is pending in the Senate Judiciary Committee."

"New York already has the longest foreclosure process in the country - averaging 445 days. That's designed to protect homeowners by giving plenty of time to work out alternatives. Extending it by another 365 days, bankers said, would make it harder for banks to keep homes occupied and prevent abandoned properties from becoming derelict."

"'We pride ourselves on taking care of the houses in foreclosure. We'll do anything to keep somebody in the house,' Czarnecki said. 'Put another year in foreclosure, and bad things tend to happen.'"

The Pocono Record from Pennsylvania. "Congress has enacted several bills to help struggling homeowners, Congressman Paul Kanjorski said Saturday, but owners themselves have to take timely proactive steps to keep their homes."

"Up to 2 million Americans could lose their homes this year, though federal and private partnerships might save 500,000 owners from foreclosure, Kanjorski said during a forum sponsored by the Pocono Mountains Association of Realtors and Pocono Builder's Association."

"'Probably some in this room aren't going to make it,' he told dozens of attendees. 'That doesn't mean your life is over.'"

"Kanjorski said some buyers and lenders have only themselves to blame for their predicament. Some buyers bought much larger homes than they could afford. He said 16 percent of subprime loans guaranteed by one property insurance company went into foreclosure without a single mortgage payment made by the buyer."

"'My question is: Where was everybody's brains?' he asked. 'Where were the regulators? And the regulators could say, 'Where was the president? Where was the Congress, the governor, the state Legislature?'"