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Four years ago, she bought her first condo in a glassy new Miami tower when the building was filling up. Now nearly one in six residents in the 43-story building is battling foreclosure and their contributions to the building association are shrinking. Each of the remaining owners has had to chip in an extra $1,000 assessment and $50 more a month for cable and Internet. That is on top of Ms. Sanz’s $450 monthly maintenance fee.

Even though she pays more, her building has broken washers and dryers and unusable exercise equipment, and her hallway is spotted with mold.

“It’s not fair,” said Ms. Sanz, a 32-year-old event planner. “The first two years, I enjoyed all of the benefits of living in a condo. I’m disappointed now. I hate the way the building looks.”

When people buy condos, they expect their monthly fees will cover many of the responsibilities that they would otherwise have as owners of single-family homes, like cutting the grass and paying the water bills. Now many find themselves nagging each other in the hallways to pay their assessments and adding special fees while haggling over chores. In Miami, Chicago and San Diego, condo owners are adjusting to the economic woes, sometimes by mowing themselves and working shifts for building security — all while lamenting their lost community.

“What motivated people to go into the condo market in a way that led to overbuilding was the expectation that it would be easier than owning a home on a maintenance basis,” said Sam Chandan, chief economist at the real estate research firm Reis. “The downside is that your fate is tied to 50 or 100 other people who may stop making their condo payments.”

Many of the numbers compiled on home sales specifically exclude condos, which account for one out of eight homes in the nation, and that missing data may be masking just how weak the housing market really is. Sales of existing condo units were down 26 percent in March from a year earlier, compared with an 18 percent decline for single-family homes, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The pain in the condo market, mostly in urban areas, may not only be deeper than in the rest of the housing market during this downturn but more prolonged. Bargain hunters say they are reluctant to buy into a building even when the upfront cost seems low because they might have to pay unexpected fees as distressed neighbors default on their mortgages or just stop paying the association fees that cover everything from taxes to pool maintenance to air-conditioning repair.

Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services, which is based in Encino, Calif., estimates that nearly 202,000 condo units will be added this year to the pool of 574,000 added nationally in the last five years. Next year will bring 94,166 more units onto the market.

“We have not even approached the bottom and will not approach the bottom until 2009,” said Hessam Nadji, managing director of research services at Marcus & Millichap.

The shabby condition of some condos means potential buyers insist on especially steep discounts on foreclosed units. Alessandro Comoglio, a 34-year-old investor from Italy, recently visited six apartments in Ms. Sanz’s Miami building with a real estate broker. Mr. Comoglio was surprised to find worn-out hallway carpeting and orange foreclosure stickers partly scratched off the doors in such a new building.

His willingness to spend stopped short of $200,000 for the condo units, which once sold as high as $700,000, according to the broker, Peter Zalewski. Mr. Comoglio also wants a written guarantee that he would not have to pay more fees.

“Nobody knows if the worst is yet to come,” he said. “Nobody knows how much prices will continue to drop.”

Rosa Rodriguez, a resident and property manager at Parkview Point Condos in Miami Beach, says her former neighbors have left her with so many problems that she would never buy a condo again. The 38 foreclosures in her 244-unit building and the unpaid dues nearly cost the residents running water because the building could not pay its bills. The building abruptly stopped repairing its ceiling lobby and left its wiring and ducts exposed when the board ran out of money. She avoids answering questions from visitors about ceiling repairs.

“We’re not going to tell them we don’t have any money,” she said. “That’s embarrassing

Americans' love affair with real estate may be cooling, but -- thanks to falling home prices and the weak dollar -- attention is heating up from another group of suitors: foreign investors.

Foreign buyers have long looked to certain U.S. markets, such as high-end properties in Manhattan or South Beach Miami, as investment opportunities.

These days, however, real-estate professionals report increased international interest in a much larger range of properties, from $60,000 single-family homes in South Florida's inland neighborhoods to $1 million waterfront villas located just miles from the Canadian border in Washington State.

Almost one in five, or 18%, realtors surveyed by the National Association of Realtors last year said they sold homes to international clients between April 2006 and April 2007. More recent data aren't yet available, but according to anecdotal evidence, those numbers continue to rise.

"There definitely is more interest in U.S. properties, no question about it," says Mark Partin, president of Trailridge Property Corp., of Toronto, which brokers deals between U.S. developers and Canadian investors interested in buying residential properties in "bulk."

For many foreign buyers, property in the U.S. is cheap. Foreign buyers also seem more optimistic about the long-term health of the U.S. market, says David Michonski, a certified international property specialist and chief executive of Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy in New York. "The foreign buyer has an unbridled confidence in the U.S. market that is lacking in the domestic purchaser today," he notes. "They view this as the bargain of a lifetime and are terribly excited about it."