More homes for sale are on the market. This is a welcome note to home buyers as more discounts are being given by the sellers. It is still a buyers market. Homes for sale all over the nation have increased over the past year.

As the inventory gets bigger, some home sellers remove their properties from the market for some time, perhaps to decorate it up a bit or make improvements and repairs then re-list. Often than not, the price during re-listing is lower. In the meantime, these homes don’t count in the homes for sale inventory.

One cause is that, developers overbuilt during the boom and, when the slump hit, they were left with large numbers of empty houses not being sold and many were left vacant by cancellations. In some places, whole streets or even subdivisions were unsold. Their interiors were not even completed.

The wait for tenants is more of a marathong rather than a sprint. Almost all are having a harder time to get a loan these days for except the best borrowers.

Borrowers, for the most part, must show proof or documentation of their income and assets, their credit worthiness and show that they can afford the payments. And most importantly, they must have the money for the down payment in buying their new home.

Those stricter lending process reduces if not eliminate potential buyers from the market. This will further reduce the demand even as more supply hits the listings due to big jumps in foreclosures and builders finishing up projects initiated before the slump took hold.

Economists are pushing back their expectations for an early housing recovery, short-term prospects for any reduction of inventory is poor.

Even the National Association of Realtors (NAR), which was almost always optimistic with its predictions, is not seeing any improvement in home sales for the next many months.

In a press release Wednesday, NAR's senior economist, Lawrence Yun, said, "Mortgage disruptions will hold back sales over the short term, but long-term fundamentals are favorable. A modest upturn is projected for existing-home sales toward the end of the year with broader improvement to include the new-home market by the middle of 2008."

Before that happens, motivated sellers may have to reduce prices to move properties.