PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - The Portland condominium craze appears to have run out of steam.
     
The first sign came months ago when Opus Northwest announced it switched its Ladd Tower from condos to apartments because of slow sales. More recently, developer Bob Ball opted to convert the Wyatt building under construction in the trendy Pearl District to rentals.
     
Before the switch, Ball said he'd cut prices and still sold only 53 units, just 21 percent of the total.
     
"The problem wasn't with the Wyatt," Ball told The Oregonian newspaper. "It was the overall change in the market. We just have too much supply on the market."
     
The building boom that boosted the supply came as demand for homes and condos soared following the dot-com bubble, fueled in part by investors who saw real estate as a foolproof moneymaker. Condos in the early 1990s went for about $120 a square foot ($96,000 for an 800-square-foot place).

Today, prices are often $400 to $500 a square foot, and developers are finding it hard to find takers at those prices.
     
When developers of The John Ross tower, a 31-story building on the Willamette River, started looking for buyers in 2005, 222 potential owners quickly put down $5,000 or more to reserve their condos.
     
Today, The John Ross has so many canceled purchases that only 192 of the 303 units are sold. Bob Scanlan, whose real estate company invested in the John Ross, says sales are so slow that he expects his returns to be cut in half.
     
The 104-unit Westerly tower near Northwest 23rd Avenue is scheduled to be complete this winter. It has sold about 40 percent of its condos.
     
The Civic, across the street from PGE Park, got hit by canceled pre-sales. Gerding Edlen Development Co. still has Civic condos to sell. But it is competing with about 20 of its own customers who are reselling just months after they moved in.

And competition awaits those sellers. There are more than 2,000 condos still under construction in the city.
     
(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press.  All Rights Reserved.)