Home sales and building are down in metropolitan Phoenix, but there are other indicators to track where the housing market is headed.

Here is a look at some:

• Home listings in the Valley climbed to almost 55,000 in the past few weeks. That’s a new high. The number of houses that are marketed for a short sale to avoid foreclosure or are bank-owned is also up. That’s good news for buyers looking for deals.

At Mountain House, visionaries carefully planned streets, schools, sewers - everything needed to create a thriving community of 16,000 homes in the middle of San Joaquin County’s farmland.

Build it and they will come. And they did.

Starting in 2003, thousands of Silicon Valley residents desperate for a house, two-car garage and back yard made the hour-plus commute from the job-rich Bay Area over the Altamont Pass to Mountain House, where home prices started in the low $300,000s.

Three companies swept up in the struggling credit markets said Monday they sold pieces of themselves or their investments to fund ongoing operations, underscoring how tight those markets still are despite government intervention last week.The buyers in these deals include a major investment bank and several well-known hedge funds.

While most of the deals were done at a discount _ in some cases a very steep discount _ they suggest bargain hunters will eventually snap up the weakened bonds and lenders that have thrust the mortgage industry into distress.

BALCH SPRINGS, TX-With a 1031 exchange clock ticking, a private investor from Corvallis, OR has gotten in under the wire with the $22.5-million acquisition of the 296-unit Stoneleigh on Cartwright. A 10-year loan, with a low 6% fixed-rate interest, is underwriting the replacement play.

“We satisfied the exchange on the last day,” Jason Cooney, managing director for Scottsdale, AZ-based Axxiom Commercial Capital, tells GlobeSt.com. The loan originator says the 80% loan-to-value financing put a now 93%-leased complex on 30.3 acres at 500 W. Cartwright Rd. into the hands of Dr. M.T. Aliniazee, who was deploying gain from the sale of the Las Vistas at Papago Park at 1010 N. 48th St. in Phoenix into his first Texas deed.