In Fort Wayne, home sales are falling. Prices are falling. There are more than 1,000 foreclosed properties in Allen County.

If you're trying to sell your house or you make a living building or brokering houses, the situation might seem dire. But the area as a whole is benefiting from being mostly left out of the party that created the U.S. housing bubble. For years, Fort Wayne homeowners missed out on the get-rich-quick mania of home appreciation that doubled or tripled real estate prices in some areas.

This is the consolation prize. Without a housing bubble to burst, housing prices don't have so far to fall. About half as many homeowners here as in the United States at large owe more on their homes than their homes are worth.

The small minority of homeowners here who are stuck with houses worth less than their mortgages generally over-borrowed, instead of being ambushed by collapsing real estate prices. People here are much less likely to be financially crushed by falling home prices than in the hot spots of housing foreclosure, such as California, Nevada, Arizona and Florida.

Earlier this month, real estate analysis firm First American CoreLogic released a nationwide analysis of how deeply outpaced American homeowners are by their mortgages.

The company said that in Fort Wayne, 11 percent of all properties with a mortgage are worth less than is owed on the mortgages. That compares with 20 percent in the nation as a whole, 40 percent in Michigan and more than 50 percent in Nevada.

"The avoidance of bubbles is generally a good thing," said David Dilts, professor of economics at IPFW. "I'd much rather be in a community that plods along without a bubble, because when the bubble blows up, it makes a big mess."

However, even the "smaller" problems created by Fort Wayne's dwindling real estate market seem daunting if you're in the middle of them.

Fewer than half as many building permits were issued by Allen County last month as in February 2008. The value of that commercial and residential work was off 75 percent.

According to the multiple-listing service that covers Allen, Adams, Wells, Whitley, Huntington and Jay counties, the number of home sales in that territory declined nearly 21 percent from the peak in 2006 to 2008. However, median home prices fell only 8 percent from their peak in 2005 to 2008.

Bob Coffee, a Realtor with Coldwell Banker Roth Wehrly Graber and president of the Fort Wayne Area Multiple Listing Service, said membership in the Fort Wayne-based Realtors group is off about 10 percent in the last year. In other words, more than 100 real estate agents decided to drop out of the business to avoid its minimum membership and licensing fees.

Coffee, who's been in the real estate business since 2001, has seen the benefits before of the slow appreciation in Fort Wayne housing prices. "It's a lot easier to live here than a lot of places, financially," he said. "Even in the best of times, we've never seen the very aggressive appreciation in prices."

But the housing slump creates headaches or hardships, even here, where it hasn't hit as hard. Banks and other financiers are holding huge files of foreclosed properties; so many properties, in fact, that Coffee said some banks appear swamped and hopelessly behind in negotiating the sale of foreclosed properties.

He tells the story of clients, a young, first-time homebuyer couple eager to make a deal on a foreclosed home. They've submitted an offer, but Coffee said it's likely to be two or three months before the bank responds to the offer.

Coffee credits the administration of President Barack Obama with creating an enormously attractive financial incentive with the $8,000 tax credit for home purchases that is part of the stimulus bill. And he said the real estate agents he talks with "are seeing really good activity out there. The number of showings is picking up. The number of buyers is picking up. The overall feeling is that we're starting to see a little bit of a pickup now."

He hopes the local market improves as soon as the end of summer, but he's not purporting to know the future.

"What I think ultimately will happen is the American people are going to get tired of the bad news and pull themselves up by their bootstraps," Coffee said.

In the meantime, not having ridden high on the housing boom is likely to help people in Fort Wayne ride out tough times better.

Dilts ticked off a summary of the advantages he sees in life outside the housing bubble.

"We're going to eat. We're going to have roofs over our heads. We're going to be able to send our kids to school. And we might buy a car every five or six years if we don't get too crazy about it. Not every place in the country is going to enjoy those luxuries," Dilts said.

Home sales in the Fort Wayne area slowed in 2008, but not nearly to the extent found in other areas of the country. The following statistics on property sales include Allen, Wells, DeKalb and Noble counties, plus some bordering areas.

Source: Fort Wayne Area Multiple Listing Service