For California’s home builders, it has gone from a perfect storm to a pathetic one.

Each week, it seems, there is more bad news as potential buyers stay away in droves. A recent wave of discounting has lured some shoppers to subdivisions, where a backlog of unsold dwellings await … something … anything.

But the price cuts, ranging from $10,000 to more than $150,000 on $1 million-plus homes, have yet to turn many of the looky-loos into buyers, according to anecdotal information from homebuilding executives.

Q: I used to live in California, where the word escrow referred to the closing of a real estate sale. For example, we said, “We’re in escrow for the sale of our house.” But then I moved to Florida where the term escrow seems to have an entirely different meaning. Here, it refers to the mortgage lender requiring the borrower to deposit a stated amount each month into escrow for payment of the property taxes and insurance bills when they come due. Which is the correct use of the word “escrow”?

Although real estate sales and prices are flat or down in dozens of metropolitan areas, micro-markets within them are performing very differently: Prices and sales are up this year over last, and plenty of buyers still want to move in.Call them real estate oases - neighborhoods and ZIP codes that defy national and regional downturns, and remain in demand as long as the local economy keeps generating jobs and rising incomes. Housing analysts say they can be found in most major markets whose local economies display moderate to strong fundamentals.

As a group, oasis micro-markets share some key characteristics. They are often:

In decades past, borrowers who were turned away from traditional mortgage lenders turned to the private lending market, where wealthy individuals or small companies offered mortgages with much higher interest rates.

Now, because of the subprime crisis, banks are again turning away borrowers with poor credit, and industry executives expect these borrowers will again turn to what are called hard-money lenders. This time, though, borrowers will have more legal protection against unscrupulous lenders.