New-home buyers in driver's seat

The Chicago Tribune reports:

For new-home buyers, it's time to be wooed:

- Up to seven months before first payments are due.

- A mortgage-rate program promising to save "up to $83,000 over 30 years."

- Up to $10,000 in free upgrades.

- $20,000 off the price of a home.

These kinds of incentives long have been used to drum up business during the winter doldrums or to jump-start activity at a moribund development. But the frenzy of deals, which some national builders rolled out in late 2005, is snowballing into summer.

It's another sign of how residential real estate sales are slowing and inventories of unsold homes are mounting.

After a half-dozen years of record growth and torrid levels of construction, builders are finding their orders dropping sharply. And as the business plummets, buyers, aware that they are in the driver's seat, are demanding--and getting--price breaks or special financing.

Many local and regional builders have joined the major players to offer incentives right through the industry's key spring sales months, into the beginning of summer.

"This is probably the first time we've seen them through the peak selling season. It's unusual that the incentives have continued all year," said housing consultant Tracy Cross, president of Schaumburg-based Tracy Cross & Associates.

It appears the market may have turned.It certainly isn't the mania of the last fews years.Those areas that have declining population are vunerable.