Timothy Geithner is obviously a very busy man. In addition to reassuring the Chinese that they have nothing to worry about the U.S. economy, he's also trying to sell his home in Westchester County, N.Y., pictured at right.

But it looks like he may have given up on the latter, at least for now.

The Associated Press is reporting that Geithner, having failed to sell his home -- even after a slight price reduction -- is renting his former home out for $7,500 a month.

Many high-profile sellers have been opting to rent their homes out, including Jim Belushi, while others like Shaquille O'Neal have had to reduce their home prices by 20 percent or more.

Experts in Westchester say Geithner is probably losing money on the deal, as he has two mortgages worth $1.25 million and annual property taxes of more than $27,000.

Luxist.com has a list of the 10 biggest price drops in recent real estate, including Leona Helmsley's estate.

With home prices down about 30% nationwide year over year, more and more sellers are likely to take their homes off the market if they don't quickly find a buyer.

The luckier ones will find a tenant who will pay enough to at least cover the taxes and the interest payments.

Brett Widness is an editor with AOL's real estate channel. Find homes for sale, foreclosures, home values, home finance and apartments at AOL Real Estate.

The New York Times profiles a woman in Mesa, Ariz., who is having a hard time making her mortgage payments since she lost her job as an executive assistant at a local university.

"Ms. Ulery is among that unhappy cohort -- her house is worth about $122,000, and she owes $143,000 -- but walking away is not for her."

Despite all the rhetoric, owners who are upside down on their mortgages and have not yet defaulted are caught in something of a netherworld, where lenders are not compelled to offer them a lower rate, but sooner or later, they are going to miss a payment or default on the loan.

According to our friends at the National Association of Realtors, the number of pending home sales jumped up 6.7% in April, the largest monthly gain since 2001. That puts the index 3.2% above its year-ago level, in the latest sign the battered U.S. housing sector is stabilizing. This was also the third consecutive month that pending home sales rose.

Now, some of these sales may fall through between now and when they were set to close, that's why they are called pending sales.

The last time the trade group's pending home sales index had risen for at least three straight months was the period from July through October 2004 -- a housing boom year.

BusinessWeek looks at 10 markets in California where housing demand has picked up of late, boosting prices off the lows we've seen in the past few months.

One of the reasons demand has picked back up is California's $10,000 tax credit for buyers, on top of the $8,000 federal first time buyer credit.

Peter Toner, a Realtor at Prudential California Realty in San Diego, says luxury homes are lingering on the market, but properties listed for less than $400,000 are selling quickly.

USAToday has found a couple in the San Francisco suburbs who had a contractor come knocking on their door offering to remove a tree -- at a discount.

"[Darien} Destino and her husband, Don, recently had their 3,000-square-foot home painted by the same contractor who bid 40 percent more for the job two years ago. The pine trees crowding the front yard were removed for half the cost requested in 2007."

By waiting two years, they got both projects done for 40-50% less than the cost they were originally quoted.

Plus, if a contractor has already done an estimate on your place, it's easier for them to assess what the job is worth to them in terms of keeping their workers busy, cash flow, etc. If you have an old quote, you may want to call that contractor back and see if they are willing to do the same job for less.

Yes ... according to the National Association of Realtors in a new report.

While interest rates have gone lower and lower for prime "conventional" mortgages, guaranteed by the FHA, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, there is no federal guarantor for the jumbo mortgage market.

According to the NAR, "the national share of home sales above $750,000 has fallen from 4.4% in 2007 to approximately 2.3% in 2009, and the months' supply of inventory has risen from 18.7 months to 41.1 months during that same period."

In other words, it will take more than three years to sell off all the homes that are priced above $750,000 at the current rate. At the same time, the $8,000 first-time home buyer credit isn't going to do you a lot of good when you have to come up with $100,000+ or more just for the 20% down payment.

States that have the highest percentage of jumbo mortgages include Hawaii (43% of all loans are above $417,000), California (41%), the District of Columbia (30%) and New York (22%).

Author and real estate pundit Barbara Corcoran says that cities like Denver, will be the first to bounce back from the housing slump.

"It's really the perfect real estate success story," she said. "It had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation for years running, and now they've cut that foreclosure rate in half and they've turned the corner."

For first-time buyers and investors, condominiums are often a way to get into a hot housing market, offering the potential for appreciation and/or rental income, without having to worry overly about a lot of maintenance costs, zoning and other issues. See the full report in Acrobat.

But the condo market has taken a beating over the past few years, in part due to overbuilding in places like Miami, but also because financing for condominiums can be more strict than single-family homes.

According to the National Association of Realtors, the average condo lost 20% of its value from the first quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009. Of the roughly 60 markets surveyed by the NAR, only five showed appreciation year over year.

The National Association of Realtors have released its city by city data for the first quarter. The bad news is that only 18 of the 150 markets surveyed showed appreciation year over year.

But which markets did the best overall?

The Cumberland, Md., metro area was the strongest market overall, with prices up more than 20% year over year. Most of the other markets showing strength were in the Midwest (Davenport, Iowa, and Columbia, Mo.), Upstate New York, and Texas/Oklahoma.

Salt Lake City was one of the stronger markets out West, up 1.9% year over year, but didn't quite make the Top 10 below.

Yale economist Robert Shiller, the creator of the S&P Case-Shiller Index and author of "The Subprime Solution" and "Irrational Exuberance," said that investors should brave the current "economic chaos" and buy stocks and real estate.

"I'm less pessimistic than I was a few months ago," Shiller said of U.S. markets in an interview in New York with Bloomberg.com. "The price-earnings ratio is about average, and by that you might say it sounds like one should be in the market and have a balanced portfolio that has a good share of stocks."

"Having a good fraction of your portfolio in stocks, not zero, is probably sensible now," he said. "People should be in real estate as well because that has a chance of rebounding. It has to be about diversification, about spreading risks."

Shiller's main point seems to be that investors shouldn't be too focused on one asset class, which is what tended to happen when homeowners were putting so much of their income into their homes, instead of splitting it up between savings, the stock market, real estate, and other asset classes.

Shiller famously sold his house and started renting after being laughed off CNBC and other media outlets for his prediction that the housing bubble would soon burst.

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Brett Widness is an editor with AOL's real estate channel. Find homes for sale, foreclosures, home values, home finance and apartments at AOL Real Estate.