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Denise Acampa, 54 and divorced, knows precisely what to do when she buys her Boston condominium. She will try a different North End restaurant every week, meet her girlfriends for cosmopolitans, and frequent the theater.

With her youngest child nearing graduation at Harvard College, Acampa is gung-ho about recapturing a lifestyle relinquished in 1982 for a husband, two children, cats, and a 42-foot swimming pool in her back yard. “When the kids come along, you live at soccer fields and baseball diamonds,” said Acampa, who paid $35,000 last spring to reserve a corner loft in the Broadluxe condo project downtown. “Now my activities are going back to the city.”

One thing stands in the way of her empty nester’s dream: a three-bedroom house in Saugus on the market since August.

Many empty nesters, the aging baby boomers whose kids are grown and out of the house, are being forced to wait for a real estate market upturn, deferring dreams of abandoning the lawnmower and suburban serenity for condo life, agents and developers said. Falling sales of single-families in Massachusetts — September sales were 24 percent below a year earlier — have produced a glut of houses for sale, enough to last 13 months. The resulting 5.3 percent price decline has been magnified by a demographic bulge of baby boomers trying to sell the family home and downsize.

“There’s a lot of reevaluation going on,” said Mark Lippolt, executive vice president of Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, one of the state’s biggest agencies. “The reason is a slowdown in the market.”

The Journal Online reports from Wisconsin. “The secret to Wisconsin’s soft landing from the 2000 to 2005 U.S. housing boom? Caution, said Marquette University economist David Clark, whose company has a contract to analyze Realtor data. ‘California, Washington, D.C., Virginia and Florida, where they had active new construction with quite a bit of speculative building, those are the ones more likely to see price reductions now,’ he said.”

“It grates on Badger State realty agents that consumers here seem as alarmed as those in high-flying states. ‘People are reading the news, people are watching the news, and it’s all about the housing slowdown. You hear it enough and you think the sky is falling,’ said Scott M. Heyerdahl, chairman of Greater Milwaukee Association of Realtors.”

“What’s lost in the hype, Heyerdahl said, is that despite ballooning inventory and slipping sales, metro Milwaukee’s market remains strong.”

“Milwaukee County’s median price rose 2.6% to $162,900. But median price slipped 2.2% to $253,100 in neighboring Waukesha County, however, home to the state’s highest prices. North Woods territory took a price hit, Vilas County by 8%, Sawyer County by 6.4% and the Ashland/Bayfield area by 5.1%.”

The Wisconsin State Journal. “In Dane County, existing home sales plunged 18 percent to 1,991, down from 2,427 during the same quarter last year. The report is the latest indicator of a shrinking real estate market and is consistent with a sharp drop in housing starts reported over the past several months.”

“The county’s deeper decline may be because the market was hotter than other parts of the state during the real estate boom, said John Deininger of the Realtors Association of South Central Wisconsin. ‘I think we’ve just had more inventory,’ he said. ‘We’ve had more houses being built because there has been a bigger demand here in the past.’”

There is panic in the real estate market. Millions of common people bought condos after condos, homes and homes with a hope to flip and make some quick bucks or just use the same as an income generation means. There were thousands of those real estate scams teaching common people how to buy homes for no down payment and then make millions out of that. The slogan was ‘If I could make millions, you can do it’. Some said ‘I will teach you how to make it happen’. Common people from the main street bought real estate after losing their shirt in the 2000 –2003 stock market route with no money down and interest only loan – even with negative amortization.

Anything that bubbles like that always falls flat and that crashing flat stays there for decades. Gold and Silver are ideal examples. The bubble in Silver gave rise to a severe bear market and then it took fifteen years for silver to build base at $5 level before coming back to a level where it should be.

Where can the residential real estate market go from here? We look to an analytic model that is based on advanced time series forecasting and stochastic dynamic programming. The real estate boom continued for a staggering seventy years. The real bear cycle down has just started. The bear market can easily stretch to thirty or forty years. After a sharp fall in prices – about 40 % on the average. The market will go sideways losing value in relation to inflation.

If real deflation hits the economy, the housing market will continue to falter and continue to go down. The biggest problem on the housing market is the pyramid effect. People have taken equities out from an existing home and bought many other homes. Then they have taken equity out from those homes to buy more homes

Area homebuilders are looking forward to closing the books on 2006, which saw the biggest downturn in their industry in more than 15 years.

Through the end of October, the number of new home building permits issued in Allen County was off 37 percent from the same period in 2005.

Rob Wacker, president of the Home Builders Association of Fort Wayne and vice president of operations at Windsor Homes, said it’s the biggest drop he has seen since 1990.

The good news is the slump already may have reversed, he said.

“Sixty days ago, I would have said it wouldn’t happen until the first quarter, but our traffic since then has been strong and sales have been good,” Wacker said.

“July and August were particularly sluggish, but then in September it turned around,” agreed Lonnie Norris, vice president of Granite Ridge Builders by Tony Reincke.

For the first 10 months of last year, 1,504 new home permits, with a total value of $281.3 million, were issued in Allen County. For 2006, just 948 permits were issued, with a total value of $182.3 million.

Norris said his company’s permit numbers are down about 20 percent for the year, but the average price of homes built is up $20,000.