“Greg Toher was outraged when he heard the prices some of the homes were going for. Walking out of the auction room, he told us, “$145,000! Unbelievable! We paid $300,000! They just got rid of at least four for $145,000!” He says he closed on his three bedroom San Simeon townhome in December, “You’ve got to be kidding me, that’s not fair.” (I thought that was Paris Hilton’s line)

OCRegister: “If late May home-selling patterns hold for the entire month, we will have just seen the slowest selling May in DataQuick’s 20-year history of O.C. home buying.”

Subprime debt is sliding into the slough of despond once more:

The WSJ says that economists at Merrill Lynch admit it is hard to predict how the slump will play out from here. “We are not sure how deflating a $23 trillion asset class — the value of real-estate assets on the household balance sheet — will end, but we doubt that it will end well,” Merrill economists wrote in their recent report. Also, at a conference of mortgage lenders in May, David Lowman, head of the mortgage business at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., warned: “The largest part of the problem in the subprime space is ahead of us, not behind us.”

Well, duh, just look at the reset schedule and reflect on the fact that the 10-year is now over 5%. No affordable fixed-rate for you, hopeful serial refinancer: