Real estate professionals say they see at least some glimmers of stability in the Long Island residential market, although nobody is ready to declare that the decline is definitely over.

Recent reports indicate that home sales and median prices declined in June compared with June of last year, but more broadly from April through June, these measures were steady with the same period in 2007.

The number of homeowners facing foreclosure has risen steeply since last year, however, and brokers in some middle-income areas report seeing distress sales in greater numbers than last year.

In Nassau, the median sale price was $485,000 in the second quarter, unchanged from the same time last year, according to a report issued in July by Miller Samuel, a Manhattan-based appraisal firm, for Prudential Douglas Elliman. In Suffolk, the median price declined less than 1 percent, to $396,550, from last year.

But the number of homes sold in Suffolk increased by 4.6 percent, to 2,999, the first year-to-year increase for any quarter in two years, according to the report. There were 2,875 home sales in Nassau in April through June, a 5.3 percent increase over last year’s second quarter.

“I don’t think we’re at the end, but at least this one quarter shows that there’s a possibility that this deterioration is slowing down,” said Jonathan Miller, who prepared the report.

Zeroing in on the monthly real estate picture, median prices in June declined 8.8 percent in Suffolk, to $383,000, and 6.8 percent in Nassau, to $452,000, when compared with prices in June last year, according to a monthly report by the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island. But compared with May, the median price was up 1.5 percent in Suffolk and 2.4 percent in Nassau.

“Prices are certainly lower than they have been, and that’s one reason why buyers are coming out and definitely making a move,” said Kathy Anastasio, owner of Anastasio Associates, a real estate firm in Huntington.

Brokers generally say that market data is not clear-cut and point to pockets of the real estate market that are doing fairly well.

“The market is slow, but there are places that can hold their own,” said Barbara Ford, president of the Multiple Listing Service and owner of Ford Real Estate in the village of Floral Park in Nassau.

In some places, like Franklin Square and Floral Park, “prices are at a level now that really represents affordability to a lot of buyers,” Ms. Ford said, citing prices from $360,000 to $550,000.

She added that there has been increased activity on Nassau’s North Shore, where asking prices have gone down.

“I think last year people were waiting for the market to fall lower; they were waiting it out,” said Terry Sciubba, an owner of Sherlock Homes, a real estate firm in Sea Cliff on Nassau’s North Shore. Lower prices and relatively low interest rates make this “a good time to buy,” according to Ms. Sciubba, who added that prices in Sea Cliff, a one-square-mile hamlet on the cliffs above the Long Island Sound, have decreased by 7 percent in the first half of the year.

Ms. Sciubba said her office had handled 30 home sales since January, ranging in price from $400,000 to $2 million. That’s about 50 percent more sales than a year earlier, she said.

Sea Cliff is part of a string of affluent North Shore communities of Nassau County, extending from Kings Point to Laurel Hollow, where 607 homes were sold in the second quarter, a 5.6 percent increase over the corresponding quarter last year. The median price in this area, $730,000, was unchanged from a year earlier, according to the Miller Samuel report.

“We’ve seen more well-qualified buyers in the last few months than we saw all last summer,” said Jyll Kata, manager of the Brookville, East Norwich and Cold Spring Harbor offices of Prudential Douglas Elliman. Well-to-do buyers, presumably with strong credit histories, apparently are undeterred by the stricter lending rules that have disqualified many buyers in less affluent areas, Ms. Kata said. She added that “sellers are a little more open to negotiate compared to a year and a half ago.”

That negotiability can be seen in North Shore sale prices, which were on average 7.8 percent lower than the seller’s last asking price, according to the report.

Brokers report that there are still occasional bidding wars and that there have been some notable high-priced sales this year. In Muttontown, a five-bedroom colonial on two acres listed for $2 million brought in multiple bids, Ms. Kata said, and it is now under contract, although she would not disclose the sale price.

On Centre Island, a waterfront mansion with a deepwater dock recently sold for $12.5 million to a buyer from England, said Barbara Candee, a real estate broker in the Locust Valley office of Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty, which handled the sale.

On average, selling a home on Nassau’s North Shore took 128 days, which is virtually unchanged from the same time last year, according to the Miller Samuel report. In Nassau over all, a home sold on average 115 days after the last asking price was set, and 118 days in Suffolk, both nearly the same as in the second quarter last year.

Across Long Island, the threat of foreclosure seems to be growing. Foreclosure filings, which can range from the initial notice of default to actual repossession of a home by the bank, increased 82.4 percent, to 3,298, in the second quarter compared with the same quarter last year, according to a July report from RealtyTrac, an Internet-based firm that tracks foreclosures nationwide. Compared with the first quarter of this year, however, the filings decreased by 1.6 percent.

Long Island had one foreclosure filing for every 304 households in the second quarter, making it 69th in RealtyTrac’s ranking of the highest rates among the 229 largest United States metro areas.

Not all homes in the foreclosure process end up being repossessed. Many owners may sell their homes or renegotiate their monthly mortgage payments to keep their homes or, if their financial situation improves, simply resume their payments.

In fact, some people think sales and prices on Long Island could have been even worse. “Initially, I had expected steeper declines because we have a big foreclosure problem and a big subprime mortgage problem,” said Pearl Kamer, chief economist for the Long Island Association, a nonprofit business and civic organization. “But the market has held up reasonably well.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/realestate/03lizo.html?_r=1&em&oref=slogin