By Lauren Baier Kim

Here’s a look at what’s new in real-estate markets across the U.S. from around the Web. (Some links may require registration or subscriptions.)

Friday is a home seller’s lucky day

Want to up the chances of selling your home? Debut its listing on a Friday, reports the Seattle Post Intelligencer, which shares seven suggested selling tactics recently released by online real-estate brokerage Redfin.com. Faced with slower home sales this fall, the company had its computer scientists crunch the numbers on past real-estate sales. What’s so good about Friday? Homes that were initially listed on a Friday received 7.7% more traffic in their first week on the market than did homes that were first listed on the “worst” day, Thursday, the company says in its report, which is available on its site.

Two tactics suggested by Redfin especially resonate in today’s housing market: Don’t try to sell a vacant home and avoid selling when nearby foreclosed homes are available, the site says. Vacant homes are 9.5% more likely to sell at a reduced price and foreclosed properties are stiff competition for home sellers because “banks selling foreclosed properties are often eager to sell at any price,” Redfin says. Among the other strategies proposed by the site include: not setting your asking price too high — homes priced correctly from the start tend to sell at higher prices; price your home to fall within house hunters’ Web searches — homes that fall below or above common Web-search price cut-offs tend to see less online traffic from house hunters (e.g., a house priced at $355,000 may see less traffic than one priced at $350,000, Redfin says); be an active participant in your home’s sale — “stay engaged;” and list your house on Craigslist — the classified listings site drove additional traffic to listings on Redfin.

California city hardest hit by housing bust

Which U.S. city has been the worst affected by this year’s housing bust? Paramount, Calif., says the New York Times. In Paramount, home sales dropped 78% in the third quarter from the third quarter in 2006, from 134 home sales to only 30 last quarter, the Times says. Home prices in the city, located south of Los Angeles, rose last year to $500,000 for a “typical house” from $200,000 in 2003, the newspaper says. Many of the sales were driven by adjustable-rate mortgages with low initial payments, a type of home loan that is more difficult to get these days, the Times notes. Other areas of the country seeing big drops in home sales tend to be “moderate-income towns on the outskirts of major metropolitan areas, where adjustable-rate mortgages had become the norm,” the newspaper says. Many of these towns are located in California’s Inland Empire east of Los Angeles and in Florida, Arizona and Nevada, the Times says.

Builders get creative to sell

Home builders are using a variety of tactics to sell homes in the Chicago area, reports the Daily Herald. Glanville-Koshul Homes, which has four houses on the market in Wheaton and Glen Ellyn, Ill., all priced above $1 million, is offering to buy the homes of those who purchase its houses — on the condition that their homes are priced under $700,000, the Daily Herald says. Another company, Empeco Custom Builders, will fix up sellers’ homes at a price, but will refund that cost when a buyer closes on an Empeco-built house, the newspaper says. KLM Builders Inc. is offering a rent-to-buy plan for three already-built town houses in Antioch, Ill. — half of the rent will go toward a down payment, the Herald says. The newspaper notes that home builders are also offering discounts on already built homes — one builder has dropped $40,000 from the price for a four-bedroom home now listed at $412,275, while another says it will give a $30,000 price reduction to buyers who close on a single-family home before the end of the year.

Foreclosed homes can be tough to find

Sure, there are more foreclosed homes on the market these days — there are approximately 5,803 foreclosed homes on the market in California’s six Southland counties, says the Los Angeles Times. But try to find the listings for such properties, and you’re in for some work, the newspaper says. That’s because there isn’t one clearinghouse for such properties — listings for these homes can be found through the Multiple Listing Service and on Realtor.com, on bank lists, in tax records, on real-estate agents’ sites and on Web sites like Realtytrac.com and Foreclosures.com, which charges users a fee, the Times says. The newspaper suggests that the “easiest way” to find foreclosures is by working with real-estate agents who specialize in such listings. “They’ve done the research, saving buyers the trouble,” the Times says.

Falling home values produce tax cuts

Lowered property taxes are taking at least a little bit of the sting out of decreasing home values in California’s Santa Cruz County, reports Kurtis Alexander of the Santa Cruz Sentinel. As a result of the housing slump, Santa Cruz County assessors have been reappraising property values, and in some instances, reducing homeowners’ tax load, Mr. Alexander says. Most affected by the tax rollbacks are sections of the county in which new homes were built within the last two years, he says. For example, Mr. Alexander highlights the case of one area resident who purchased his two-bedroom, two-bath condo for $575,000 at the beginning of 2006 and will now save at least $300 a year in taxes because of the drop in his home’s value, Mr. Alexander reports. However, while the downturn in the market is producing some tax cuts for area residents, it’s also expected to result in millions of lost revenue for local cities, with Watsonville — whose growth in property tax revenues was 16% the past fiscal year but may be reduced to 5% or less this year — to be the most affected, he says. “We know we’re entering into leaner times but no one knows the magnitude yet,” he quotes the city’s manager as saying.

Ms. Kim is a senior editor at RealEstateJournal.com.