By: Eric Kalis – Daily Business Review (Miami)

Maefield Development, which has been busy trying to save its massive City Square project in Miami, sold 46 residential condos and two commercial units in Capri South Beach for nearly $31 million.

Operating as MaeCapri, Indianapolis-based Maefield sold the units for $30.79 million to Capri Residential Properties, according to Miami-Dade County records.

Maefield chief executive Mark Siffin declined to discuss the bulk sale when reached for comment on Friday.

Maefield only sold 20 of 69 residential units before the bulk sale, according to Miami-Dade County records. With the sale to Capri Residential, Maefield has three unsold residential units remaining.

Capri Residential paid per-unit prices ranging from $157,398 to $1.5 million, according to Miami-Dade records. No financing was recorded with the sale.

Maefield also sold a pair of condos at The Strand on Ocean for $10 million to Capri Residential affiliate Strand Commercial Properties, according to Miami-Dade records. The two condos total 12,488 square feet.

Capri Residential obtained a $4.5 million loan from Sabadell United Bank for the Strand condos.

Miami attorney Diane Hernandez, who represented Capri Residential in the purchase, did not immediately return a call for comment.

State corporate records do not list a principal for Capri Residential. Calls to a phone number listed by state records were not immediately returned.

Maefield was a “victim of the times,” said Miami Beach broker Mark Zilbert, who was not involved with the Capri transaction.

“When Capri came to the market, people were shying away from new purchases,” Zilbert said. “There was a lull for a couple of years. Had the project premiered a year or two earlier, all the units would have sold and you would have never seen a bulk sale.”

Bulk condo sales have become the norm in South Florida as developers of stalled projects face continued pressure from lenders. Many recent bulk deals have occurred in downtown Miami and Brickell Avenue areas, not Miami Beach.

Maefield apparently did not sell the units to satisfy an antsy lender. Miami-Dade County did not record any foreclosure actions against Maefield. Fremont Investment & Loan of Brea, California, gave Maefield a $60.45 million loan in May 2005. The loan was assigned to iStar Financial in December 2008.

Maefield “was probably sitting there with a project that had not been selling well,” Zilbert said. “There’s a breaking point every developer has. The buyers we spoke to about Capri were kind of afraid about who will be there” with so few prior closings.

Zilbert predicted the wave of bulk condo deals in the region will soon pass as buyers become more comfortable with pricing.

“We won’t see many more bulk deals,” Zilbert said. “Individual buyers are regaining confidence. They are not going to overpay, but in some cases the fear of paying a premium to get something special is diminishing.”

Capri Residential should be able to support the purchase price by renting out some of the condos immediately and then selling them over a two- to five-year period, he said.

“It should be a damn good investment,” Zilbert said.

WELCOME CASH

For Maefield, the Capri bulk sale generates much-needed revenue as the company attempts to close on the purchase of 10 acres next to the Miami Herald building in downtown Miami for the long-discussed City Square project.

Miami attorney and developer Pedro Martin signed a contract in March 2005 to buy the land from then-Herald owner Knight Ridder for $190 million and immediately flip it to Maefield for $230 million. The sale’s closing has been delayed numerous times since then.

Current Herald owner McClatchy has extended the purchase agreement several times, including last January when it moved the closing deadline to January 2011 in exchange for an additional $6 million deposit. Maefield and Martin would lose $23 million in two deposits and a termination fee if they fail to close on the purchase.

The most recent proposal for City Square is an eight-story parking garage topped by a pair of 200-foot video billboards. The garage and billboards, which Siffin said in May were “always part of the project,” have been pushed to center stage as a proposed retail center and twin 70-story condo towers take a back seat.

1)  Banks that foreclose on condos will be required to pay up to 12 months of past due maintenance,

2)  Condo associations can collect rent from deliquent owners,

3)  Deliquent condo owners can have their common area and voting rights suspended and

4) Bulk investors can buy more than 6 units in a condo and not be considered the developer. 

These are just some highlights of the new act, and some of these provisions need further explanation.  Refer to the State of Florida website or general news media for more details.  But, this is very welcomed by condo associations and condo owners.

Beach ball

By ANDY WANG

Last Updated: 5:18 PM, December 3, 2009

Posted: 11:59 PM, December 2, 2009

The Miami winter social season starts in earnest this week as Art Basel, Art Miami and dozens of satellite events take over much of the city’s prime real estate. But when it comes to selling ultra-pricey Miami condos, it looks like the party has already begun.

According to developer David Edelstein, the W South Beach hotel-condo building that opened in June has recently closed sales at some staggering prices. Edelstein mentions a 2,700-square-foot unit that closed two weeks ago for $7.25 million — a sky-high $2,685 per square foot. In October, a deal closed on a 2,965-square-foot unit for $8.1 million — an even more exorbitant $2,732 per square foot.

And with a slew of high-profile Art Basel events at W South Beach — including tonight’s dinner and after-party hosted by Aby Rosen (part of the building’s development team) and a Saturday performance by Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols — Edelstein expects to lure more buyers to his 408-unit building at 22nd Street and Collins Avenue.

“We think it will be a huge year for Art Basel,” says Edelstein, who notes that his hotel, with rooms from $659 to $7,200, is sold out all week. “And one of the greatest sources [of condo sales] are the hotel guests.”

While W South Beach (designed by architecture firm Nichols Brosch Wurst Wolfe & Associates) is no doubt making a huge splash, its ultimate success and what it means for the Miami market remain to be seen. Edelstein says he has signed deals for about $500 million worth of W South Beach condos. He has closed about $100 million.

“We have not had enough time to see [W South Beach]’s impact over the long term,” says Miami broker Mark Zilbert of Zilbert Realty Group, who specializes in the condo market. “But it’s a very popular spot.”

W South Beach — where prices start around $1,400 per square foot for smaller units — looks like the newest, priciest kid on the block, but other prominent South Beach buildings are also fetching NYC-level prices. And bottom-fishing buyers looking for crazy beach deals are probably going to be disappointed.

“Everybody wants a balcony over the beach at 50 cents on the dollar,” Zilbert says. “The problem is that when you look at prime oceanfront property in a new building, there’s still sticker shock.”

Numerous hotel-condo units at the Setai, just south of W South Beach, are listed for around $1,200 to $1,400 per square foot. And over at Continuum, located at the southern tip of South Beach, the price range for many condos is around $950 to $1,200 per square foot. While Miami prices overall, Zilbert says, are down 30 to 40 percent from their peak, they haven’t really changed since the spring. The difference now, he says, is that people are actually buying.

“When the market was really at its worst, it was hard to sell anything over a million dollars,” Zilbert says. “After last October to about June or July, it was a very, very dark period. I ran my half-year numbers around June, and we were at about half of what we were the year before. People were just afraid to buy anything.”

But rich buyers seem to be on the prowl again. Zilbert says he’s seeing more traffic from New York-based buyers now than he has in the last three years combined.

“There is a clearly a market for five-star oceanfront,” Zilbert says. “And these buyers don’t shop around a lot. They want what they want.”

A market largely powered by this kind of buyer can be hard to get a handle on, of course. It’s a market that seems to change from building to building. And there’s no question that Miami is overbuilt and subpar projects are in uncertain waters. Gansevoort South, located just north of W South Beach, has halted its condo sales effort, for example.

And for those who can’t afford $1,000 square per foot in Miami, there are many brand-name choices if they’re willing to look beyond South Beach. Canyon Ranch, about 4 miles north of South Beach, has some units priced around $500 per square foot. Word is that a team from New York brokerage firm Brown Harris Stevens is about to take over sales there.

Condos for $500 per square foot or less are even easier to find in downtown Miami, where thousands of unoccupied units seem to indicate a market in peril. Although high-profile developments such as Icon Brickell and Marquis Miami have glammed up the area, Zilbert notes that “on an individual-buyer basis, there’s great resistance into putting money in downtown condos. There are issues with empty buildings, foreclosures, people not paying their maintenance.”

Zilbert adds that “a lot of people downtown are renting. There will be a very strong rental market probably for five years.”

However, some well-priced developments off the beach seem to be thriving. The gargantuan, 56-acre Midtown Miami mixed-use complex, adjacent to the Design District, has three residential towers that are 97 percent occupied, according to a project spokesperson. Prices start at $1,500 for one-bedroom rentals (812 to 937 square feet) and $375 per square foot for condos.

And one advantage of being off South Beach is having much more room and infrastructure for huge events. Art Miami, celebrating its 20th anniversary, is taking up 85,000 square feet of space at Midtown Miami.

“There’s great parking directly across the street, sidewalks, palm trees,” says Nick Korniloff, Art Miami’s show director/partner. “There’s a lot of open space. It allows us to have big outdoor sculptures, outdoor areas, cafes. It’s a much easier location than the beach.”

Of course, there are shuttle buses from Midtown to South Beach for all those art collectors, party people and potential real estate buyers in town this week. And this is all the beginning of a busy season that includes numerous holiday galas in December, the Pro Bowl in January, and the Super Bowl, Miami International Boat Show and South Beach Wine & Food Festival in February.

Over at W South Beach, everything up to this point has “been spring training,” Edelstein says. “The real season starts now.”

And as Zilbert points out, this season should be bigger than the last winter season.

“Art Basel last year was not too long after the Wall Street meltdown,” he says. “It’s much more exciting this year. We have many, many clients who have mentioned they will be in town. We’ll be very busy. We expect to write a lot of contracts.”

About 10 investors are expected to submit bids to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. by Friday for $5 billion in condominium loans and other property held by the failed Corus Bank, in a key test of U.S. commercial real-estate values.

The government-run auction, with loans backed by more than 100 real-estate developments, is the largest bulk sale of commercial-property assets since the financial crisis erupted. Bidders are looking at some of the highest-profile condo projects in the U.S., scattered from the waterfront Paramount Bay in Miami to Juhl in downtown Las Vegas.

Among the real-estate investors jockeying for what is left of Corus, which was seized Sept. 11, are a joint venture that includes Related Cos. and Lubert-Adler Partners LP; a team of Miami developer Crescent Heights and Dallas private-equity firm Lone Star Funds; Starwood Capital Group; and an investor group led by Colony Capital LLC and iStar Financial Inc., according to people familiar with the situation. Representatives for the investor groups declined to comment.

Christina House

PRNewsFoto

Aaron Auxier

Among the condo projects backed by loans included in the government’s auction of Corus Bank’s commercial-property assets are, from top: the high-rise Concerto development in Los Angeles; the Allure Waikiki; and Juhl in downtown Las Vegas. The portfolio holds $5 billion in loans.

“We are offering specialized investors an opportunity to purchase an equity stake” in up to $5 billion of Corus’s loans, an FDIC spokesman said. “The more that the FDIC can obtain for the overall portfolio, the more we can recoup on behalf of the creditors and our deposit insurance fund.”

Such distressed real-estate sales were common in the wake of the real-estate collapse of the early 1990s, generating fortunes for savvy buyers as the market recovered and property values soared. Part of the problem today has been that few properties have been sold, making it difficult for lenders to value portfolios.

Experts following the Corus auction predict that bids will range from 30 cents on the dollar for nonperforming loans to 80 cents on the dollar for loans where the borrower is current on payments. The winning bid promises to be scrutinized by lenders across the U.S., many of which have been struggling with the valuations on thousands of condo projects and other commercial developments now in trouble.

The Corus auction “is going to create a new mark,” says Norman Radow, chief executive of Radco Cos., an Atlanta developer specializing in distressed condo projects across the U.S.

The pace of distressed-asset auctions by the FDIC and other sellers is expected to accelerate. So far this year, 94 U.S. banks have failed, and others are in critical condition. Meanwhile, a record amount of than $800 billion in commercial mortgages are expected to come due in the next three years.

The winning bidder for Corus’s loans is likely to try to foreclose on properties that are in default or cut deals with their developers. One potential strategy for squeezing profits from the loans is to buy them at 40 cents on the dollar, and then try to sell them back to developers for 80 cents on the dollar.

Some Corus borrowers have approached the FDIC for a chance to bid on their loans, according to people familiar with the process. The agency rebuffed those efforts, saying it is willing to sell only the whole portfolio.

That stance has sparked criticism by some borrowers who are worried the winning bidder could be a competing developer seeking to take over their projects. The winning bidder “may play hardball and put us in default,” said Sonny Astani, who has a $190 million loan with Corus for a high-rise condominium development called Concerto in Los Angeles.

The Corus transaction is being structured as a partnership between the agency and winning bidder. The FDIC will hold a 60% stake and provide financing, according to people familiar with the matter. While seven other FDIC deals since 2008 have had similar partnership structures, the Corus deal is by far the largest. A similar arrangement was made in last week’s sale of $1.3 billion in residential mortgages to a venture between the FDIC and Residential Credit Solutions Inc., these people said.

The public-private partnership structure is modeled on about 70 such deals pioneered by Resolution Trust Corp., a federal agency formed to clean up the savings-and-loan mess of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Rising property values in the mid- and late-1990s enabled the RTC to reduce taxpayer losses.

Still, the partnerships expose the U.S. to more financial risk than it might face by selling assets completely to private investors. The Corus auction also is complicated by an oversupply of condos in some of the same states where Corus concentrated its lending, such as Florida, California and Nevada.

In most of the FDIC deals involving failed banks during the current mess, the agency has lined up buyers to take over loans, deposits, branches and most other assets. For some failed banks like Corus, the FDIC decided to separately sell some hard-to-value assets. When Corus was seized, another Chicago bank, MB Financial Inc., agreed to assume 11 branches and about $6.6 billion in deposits from Corus. The FDIC has estimated that the Corus failure will cost its insurance fund about $1.7 billion.

—Nick Timiraos contributed to this article.

Write to Lingling Wei at lingling.wei@dowjones.com and Anton Troianovski at anton.troianovski@wsj.com

A New York City investor is the new owner of the Caribbean Miami Beach condominium.

The buyer, an affiliate of New York City-based Melohn Properties, bought the mortgage from ailing Corus Bank.

The Chicago-based bank (NASDAQ: CORS) had given Caribbean Group Owners a $127.7 million mortgage to renovate the hotel into a 103-unit oceanfront condominium at 3737 Collins Ave., in Miami Beach. The developer, a partnership between Christa Development and Bluerock Real Estate, had sold just 13 units since July 2008.

Corus Bank, which faces a risk of failure under the weight of delinquent condo construction loans, sold its mortgage on Aug. 19 to 3737 Caribbean Partners. A source familiar with the deal said that Corus Bank had previously offered the note for sale at between $50 million and $55 million.

Christa Development VP Frank Christa said the developers have voluntarily turned over the Caribbean Miami Beach to the new lender.

“The new lender is in charge of it,” said Christa, who noted that no foreclosure lawsuit was filed.

Marcela Catapano Criscito, a real estate agent hired by the owner of the Caribbean Miami Beach to sell units, concurred.

The Caribbean Miami Beach was designed by architect Kobi Karp, with interiors designed by Christopher Ciccone, the brother of pop star Madonna. It has a heated infinity-edge swimming pool, spa, sun deck, billiard lounge, fitness center, wine vault, cigar humidor and 24-hour concierge service.

Units were priced from $500,000 to $8 million. They are divided between the renovated six-story building, with 35 units, and a new 19-story tower, with 68 units.

Condo Vultures CEO Peter Zalewski called the Caribbean Miami Beach the crown jewel of Corus Bank’s loan portfolio. With its strong location and quality design, it can probably have its units sell for between $450 and $550 a square foot, he said.

“The owner will flip these units immediately,” Zalewski said. “They probably have the ability to burn through most of them during the tourism season.”

Zalewski, who has looked at the project on behalf of potential buyers, said Corus Bank could not have made this deal without the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. signing off on it. At least six groups were competing to take it over, he said.

“The Caribbean was the most desirable bulk play in South Beach because so few projects there were in distress,” Zalewski said.

A Melohn Properties official was not immediately available for comment.

Are the good ‘old days of real estate back? It appears so in Downtown Miami.

In recent weeks developers have sold hundreds of condos, in a flurry of activity they haven’t seen since the peak of the housing market. Some builders are actually running out of inventory. The first building to sell out, Brickell on the River, happened quietly and quickly selling 120 units in just six weeks time.

“It’s pretty impressive when you walk into a sales office and you have 20-30 people waiting to see units. Sounds crazy but it’s actually happening now,” Andres Asion, with Miami Real Estate Group, told CBS4′s David Sutta.

Before Asion could deposit the checks, he had sold out the entire building out; something developers in this area have not been able to do for the past three years.

So how did Asion do it?

Price. They dropped it roughly a $100 thousand under their closest competition. The final prices were half of what units sold for at the peak of the market.

“You could see it in the pricing. When you could buy a two bedroom condo for $220,000 in which before it was $450,000 people are really pulling the trigger,” Asion said.

It appears other developers have taken notice.

1060 Brickell followed Brickell on the River’s lead to drop prices; they’ve just sold out. The Ivy is expected to be next.

“It’s just a wave. The investors are swarming from one building to another to another and all of it has to do with price point which is roughly $200 a square foot. That’s really the magic number,” said Peter Zalewski of Condovultures.com which constantly keeps tabs on the sales of the downtown market.

Zalewski said in recent months he’s watched inventory decline rapidly. The market once had 25,000 units for sale, but as of late Zalewski believes it’s down to under 9,000 units; half of which are in buildings that are empty and in some form of foreclosure. That leaves just 4500 units up for grabs.

Zalewski believes the housing market downtown may be the first to emerge out of the recession.

“Most people are saying it’s spin. It’s the realtors trying to blow smoke and trying to get people back into the marketplace. That’s not the case. Walk yourself into a sales center that’s priced at $200 a square foot. Take a number. Kick back and try to get a soda. You won’t even be able to get a soda out of the refrigerator they are running out of the stuff so quickly,” said Zalewski.

Looking at sales it appears most are not being made to ‘bulk’ buyers. However Zalewski believes most are being made to foreign nationals, investors looking to flip once again in Miami real estate, and that could be a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, investors may be bailing out downtown Miami, renting out their units and bringing life to the area. On the other they could be making another bad gamble which could lead to another wave of downtown foreclosures.

Patricia Delinois’ Black-Berry is buzzing again. After a long, dreary drought, her Sunday afternoons are filling up with open houses.Delinois, who handles very expensive real estate, says a flurry of new activity is providing hope that the luxury home market has a pulse again, after taking a beating in recent months — albeit with kid gloves.

“We were having open houses and nobody would come,” said Delinois, presi-dent of Century 21 Premier Elite Realty. “Now, we’re getting five, six, 10 families coming through. I’m really praying and keeping my fin-gers crossed this is a perma- nent thing.”

Confidence seems to be returning, as well as a rising tide of money from outside the country, positive signs for both the high-end housing market, and the real estate market in general. Demand fed by foreign money has always been a critical piece of the real estate puzzle in South Florida.

“We’re on our way out of the worst [of the economic downturn]” said Manny Mesa, a Doral-based trial lawyer who is hunting for a bigger home for his wife and four children.

On Thursday, he toured the digs of former Miami Heat point guard Tim Hardaway. Hardaway is asking $3.9 million for the five-bedroom, five-bath home on almost two acres in the Pinecrest area. It boasts a six-foot coral rock wall for privacy and a closet the size of a very large bedroom.

“People are confident that the world is not ending,” said Adam Greenberg, a managing director for BayBridge, a Miami-based brokerage and mortgage banking firm. “They were so concerned it was ending and that our financial system could falter.”

When the global economy took a dive last year, real estate prices plummeted, including prices for South Florida’s toniest properties, priced at $1 million or more.

And then things got worse. As the calendar year turned, fear that the global financial system was heading off a cliff brought South Florida’s luxury home market — largely dependent on foreign wealth — to a standstill. In January, just nine houses priced over $1 million sold in Miami-Dade and seven in Broward.

But now brokers and some analysts are sensing a collective, if tentative, sigh of relief among the very wealthy, as evidenced by the recent uptick in luxury home sales. In June, the last full month of available data, 25 were sold in Broward and 41 in Miami-Dade.

The figures are still significantly off from the market’s peak, when about twice as many were selling on a monthly basis. And prices are still droopy.

Nonetheless, real estate brokers say it is evident that foreign buyers are returning to South Florida as news spreads globally that many of the region’s tropical, waterfront palaces are on sale. Among the bargains: Shaquille O’Neal’s 2.45 acre estate on Star Island, which sold recently for $16 million, about $2 million less than he paid for it in 2004.

SALES PITCH Marketing a really ritzy home can involve having a robust website devoted just to that one property, color spreads in the Robb Report (billed as “The Global Luxury Source”) and advertising spots on shows like Extra and Power Lunch on CNBC. But in other ways it’s not that different from selling a two-bedroom CBS in South Miami. Delinois recommends having scented candles burning and a loaf of bread baking in the oven.

“Smell is very, very important,” said Delinois, who must know something, having sold Hulk Hogan’s home on North Bay Road in Miami Beach for a whopping $17.9 million.

Alas, despite Delinois’ recommendation, Hardaway didn’t have any candles burning or bread baking when Mesa stopped by. He didn’t get the sale either.

Mesa said he was going to keep on looking.

Brokers and analysts say the renewed activity in high-end real estate is at least partly because of a revived interest among lenders in making very large loans, called jumbo loans.

Banks’ appetite for jumbo loans — defined as more than $423,750 in South Florida — had all but evaporated as lenders hunkered down to weather the storm.

“They are marketing, inviting us to their offices to meet with them to tell us what they can do,” said Tere Bernacé, a broker specializing in waterfront properties in Coral Gables and a former banker with Barclays Capital. “They say they are trying to increase their profile again in our market.”

Added Delinois: “I have never had a bank calling before to say they were lending.” BayBridge’s Greenberg said banks are interested in the rich and famous because they are looking for safety.

“They see values as very depressed and borrowers in the super luxury home market as a very unlikely default candidates,” he said.

In the past 30 days, BayBridge has closed three loans that were over $5 million.

“I’ve never had a client that has defaulted on a loan over $5 million, in the nine years I’ve been doing this,” Greenberg said.

Spokesmen for Ocean Bank and BBU Bank in Coral Gables acknowledged they are actively seeking the business of luxury home buyers.

That doesn’t mean the loans are easy to get. Large loans require much heftier down payments — up to 50 percent of the purchase price — and stringent verification of income and assets.

Those who buy in the ultra-luxury category (homes priced at $5 million or more) often aren’t looking for loans.

“Most of the people who buy at this price point don’t finance, and if they do, it’s a matter of convenience,” said Audrey Ross, a senior vice president of Esslinger Wooten Maxwell.

In the past three months, Ross brokered three sales in Gables Estates — each for more than $5 million, she said. Two were all-cash transactions.

FIRST TO RECOVER Ross, who has specialized in high-end real estate for 25 years, said typically the ultra-luxury sector takes less of a hit in real estate downturns and is usually the first to recover.

Luxury prices have held up significantly better in the current slump than the market as a whole, according to Coral Gables-based real estate analyst David Dabby.

For homes selling for more than $1 million, the price per square foot has fallen about 14 percent in Miami-Dade and 20 percent in Broward from the 2006 peak.

That compares to a 50 percent decline in the market as a whole, Dabby said.

Jill Hertzberg, a broker with Coldwell Banker, who along with her partner Jill Eber was ranked eighth nationwide in sales volume last year by The Wall Street Journal and LORE Magazine, said unheard of deals on luxury properties are driving interest.

Hertzberg cooed over a fully renovated home in Miami Beach with a stunning wide-water vista of Miami’s skyline that “`screamed out to anyone wanting a downtown view and a beautiful home.”

Originally listed for $4.1 million, the property was dropped to $3.2 million and quickly drew multiple offers. It is now under contract and a closing date has been set.

“These are great properties,” Hertzberg said. “They aren’t second-rate properties. They are adjusting down to prices that are incredible, that no one has see before and people are buying them.”

After a plunge lasting three years, houses have finally become cheap enough to lure buyers. That, in turn, is stabilizing prices, generating hope that the real estate market is beginning to recover.

Eight cities, including Chicago, Cleveland, Denver and San Francisco, showed price increases in May, up from four in April and one in March, according to data released Tuesday. Two other cities, Charlotte, N.C., and New York, were flat.

For the first time since early 2007, a composite index of 20 major cities was virtually flat, instead of down.

“We’ve found the bottom,” said Mark Fleming, chief economist for First American CoreLogic, a data firm.

The release of the surprisingly strong Case-Shiller Price Index, compiled by Standard & Poor’s, followed earlier reports that sales of existing homes rose last month for the third consecutive time, while sales of new homes rose in June by the largest percentage in eight years.

All of these improvements are tentative, and come after a relentless decline that knocked more than half the value off houses in the worst-hit cities.

Some skeptics say they believe the market is merely pausing before it resumes falling and that much of the life in the market is coming from speculators. Even the most enthusiastic analysts acknowledge that rising unemployment, another leap in foreclosures or a significant jump in interest rates could snuff out progress.

Still, hope is growing in some quarters that the worst has passed.

“Recession is over, economy is recovering — let’s look forward and stop the backward-looking focus,” John E. Silvia, the Wells Fargo chief economist, wrote Tuesday in a research note.

Kirit Shah decided to look forward a few weeks ago. A retired forensic chemist for the New York Police Department, he closed on a house in Royal Palm Beach, Fla.

Mr. Shah was not dissuaded when the salesman at K. Hovnanian Homes told him the five-bedroom place had been empty since it was finished three years ago. “It was waiting for me,” said Mr. Shah, 64. “I’m on a lakefront. I never dreamed I would be on a lakefront. I’m within walking distance of a swimming pool.”

But the thing he likes best is this: he paid $260,000 for the five-bedroom house, half of what that model was fetching during the boom. “An excellent deal,” he said. “Plus I got a good rate on my mortgage, under 5 percent.”

Turning markets are full of uncertainty. If Mr. Shah was one reason new home sales were up 11 percent in June from May, it is unclear just how many others like him are out there.

Brad Hunter, chief economist for Metrostudy, a research firm, said the new home numbers appeared to illustrate less a return of buyers like Mr. Shah and more a resurgence of investors and speculators. Metrostudy’s own data showed that the number of buyers during the second quarter who actually moved into their new house declined 2.6 percent.

“Investors are turning right around and putting the houses on the market for sale or for rent,” Mr. Hunter said. “What appears to have been an absorption of excess inventory can be just a changing of ownership of that inventory.”

The good news in the Case-Shiller index, the most widely watched source of price information about the housing market, is equally provisionary. Tracking only large urban areas, the monthly index does not represent the country as a whole.

The Case-Shiller figures released Tuesday showed May prices were down 17.1 compared with May 2008. As bad as that may sound, it was the fourth consecutive month that price declines slowed — a step in the right direction, but perhaps not cause for widespread celebration.

More attention was focused on the news that, when May was compared with April, the price index for 20 major cities showed a half-percent gain. It was the first month-over-month increase in the index in 34 months.

“It is very possible that years from now we will say that April 2009 was the trough in home prices,” said Maureen Maitland, vice president for index services at Standard & Poor’s.

When the numbers were adjusted for seasonal factors, however — the usual way housing figures are presented — the slight gain disappeared and the index was essentially flat. Half of the cities showed continued declines.

One reason the market is perking up in some places, real estate agents say, is the encouragement offered by such measures as the first time buyer’s tax credit of $8,000.

All the more reason, said the National Association of Realtors, to not only extend the credit but expand it. The association is lobbying for the current credit, which expires in December, to be replaced with a $15,000 credit for all buyers.

“This is a relatively low-cost way to keep the housing market moving forward,” said Paul Bishop, the association’s managing director of research.

Another reason for the market’s resurgence is the prevalence of foreclosures, which make up about a third of all existing home sales. In some troubled regions, agents say they cannot remember the last transaction that did not involve a bank disposing of a property.

These communities are not yet showing any improvement in prices. Las Vegas was the worst-performing city in the May Case-Shiller index, falling 2.6 percent. Prices have fallen there by a third in the last year.

“The mom and pop that work at the Hilton can now afford a home here again,” said Justin Pechonis, a Las Vegas real estate agent. “Las Vegas is a great place to buy now.” But not from him. Sickened by seeing so many clients foreclosed on, he is getting out of the business. He now drives a taxi.

All this uncertainty breeds a hesitancy that seems to show up in nearly every sale, especially at the higher end of the market. When Margot and Pascal Lalonde decided in April to sell their two-bedroom condominium in the North End of Boston, they methodically quizzed six experienced agents about a good price.

List it for under $500,000 unless you want to be here for months, said one agent. Two others said they should demand $675,000. The other three were in between.

“In a market with so few sales, no one knows what to do,” said Ms. Lalonde, a consultant.

After 80 days on the market and two small price reductions, the condo is now under contract for $550,000. The buyers examined the apartment six times. The Lalondes, who are moving to Short Hills, N.J., expect to be no less careful when they buy.