This is to be expected. If one wishes to know WHY, square one deserves an examination. In square one the large track builders were building, along with the smaller and custom people, homes that matched income levels of persepctive buyers. This market was just fine with buyers putting money down and taking standard type notes. This is ca. 2001. By 2002 the banks are getting inventive, the builders are building fancier and more costly homes and down payments are getting to 2% and less. By 2003 nearly all building is in the luxury level, the banks are leding feely and "0" down and finance the closing costs are a norm. What is wrong here is that the so-called owner is really a renter. The builders are stuck, big and small alike as they built up-scale and now money and buyers are tight. The story is nice and certainly expected, but if one deducts the figures of starts from the big players you will find that they do not have a majority share of the housing market. The unseen problem here is that the smaller people usually do not have big financial reserves and they do business with smaller local and regional banks. Now, what happens when their projects start to fail? What happens when the smaller institutions have these write-downs? Well, there not write-downs as these are real properties. In this case the banks will sell off cheap to try to re-coup some of the loss. But if the amount on maket becomes too great and buyers are scarce? This is the next blind curve in the financial road.

when interest rates started to move up a year or two ago and fuel went up the housing market went into decline