$149,999

Asking price of a two-year-old four-bedroom house in Henderson, Nevada, that's being sold in a short sale—the property is going for less than the mortgage on it—according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. That's about $65,000 less than what a similar new house built by the same company, Pulte Homes, is selling for in that Las Vegas suburb. You'd never expect a relatively new home to go in a short sale, but in today's distressed housing market, the old thinking just doesn't hold anymore. Perhaps the homeowners are facing foreclosure and decided to sell instead of walking away from the property.

New-home sales in this country are down 77 percent from their 2005 peak and sit at their lowest level in four decades, and boomburbs like Henderson have been particularly hard hit in the real-estate meltdown. In an attempt to sell new homes that can compete with foreclosed properties, builders nationwide are constructing smaller houses, part of the rightsizing trend. In a recent survey by the National Association of Home Builders, 88 percent of respondents said they intend to build smaller homes. And KB Homes says the average square footage of the homes it's building in some areas today is about 1,600, half what it was just a few years back. "We're finding that if we can get a product to market that is priced competitively with foreclosures, [we] can sell pretty well, even in these times," KB's Jeffrey Mezger told the Journal.