Seems that everyone is looking for help from the U.S. government these days. Add homebuilders to the list of those seeking a little financial pick-me-up.

According to a Sept. 29 story by Bloomberg News, which you can read here,  officials with the National Association of Home Builders are asking members of Congress to pass a $15,000 tax credit for all homebuyers. This, officials with the trade association hope, will entice consumers to purchase homes.

The builders association says that homebuilders have seen at least $19 billion in losses since 2006.

Now, that is a lot of losses. But I don’t remember the homebuilders association proposing that their members give any of their profits back during the housing boom that ran from about 2001 through 2006.  And last time I checked, most homebuilders were advocates of the free market when their profits were soaring as home prices skyrocketed during the boom times. But now that their profits have fallen, they want the government to step in.

I feel the same way about the proposed federal bailout. Where have the rabid free-market fans gone?

The residential real estate slump has claimed several victims. None may be as visible, though, as the unfinished new-construction homes that dot the country.

Crain’s Chicago Business , one of the top business publications around, recently wrote a small story about the high number of new-construction homes that have yet to be finished. Crain’s refers to them as white elephants.

What usually happens is that developers or homeowners run out of money before they can finish construction.

Crain’s profiles a Chicago couple who own a former farmhouse that sits on two-and-a-half city lots. After a small fire, the owners moved out, and have left the house vacant for the last 25 years. The owners, however, did decide to add an addition to the house. Unfortunately, they never finished it. The four-bedroom house — unfinished and all — is sitting on the market now for $2.5 million.

You can bet that house is going to be a tough sell. It’s a struggle to sell any home these days. One that’s unfinished? That’s a challenge for the top real estate agents.

Here’s a sure sign that the housing market is struggling: Walk through your neighborhood. Have all those “For Sale” signs you used to see become “For Rent” signs?

Then you know there’s trouble in the housing market.

Owners only turn “For Sale” signs into “For Rent” signs when they’ve given up hope of finding a good buyer for their properties.

I noticed this the other day when walking through my own neighborhood. It’s especially glaring at one house in particular. This is a home that a builder purchased and gut renovated. It’s beautiful on the inside; I know because the builder showed me through it.

But all that hard work has resulted in zero solid offers.

So last week? The builder’s “For Sale” sign was replaced by a “For Rent” sign.

There are many ways to gauge just how tough sellers have it. The “For Rent” signs are a dramatic one.

I’ve criticized the major real estate associations in the past for spinning bad real estate news. The associations have blamed the media for making the housing crisis seem worse than it is. They’ve claimed that the current real estate slump is just a natural correction. And they’ve spent months predicting that we’ve finally reached the bottom of the market.

To me, that’s all spin. The real truth? The housing market is awful. And there’s little hope of a quick recovery.

The National Associaton of Home Builders in a recent press release took this game of spinning negative news into positive to absurd levels.

A recent association release’s headline claimed that home buyers are finally responding to lower housing prices in metro areas. Reading this headline, you’d assume that buyers are snatching up newly built homes, with their lower price tags, in growing numbers.

Now, here’s the actual statistical information cited in the release: Existing-home sales rose from the first quarter in 13 states. Now, if my math is correct, that means existing-home sales didn’t rise in 37 states. To me, this doesn’t seem like buyers responding positively to lower-priced homes.

I know everyone in the real estate industry is tired of the bad news. But let’s not look silly in trying to find that glimmer of hope.

The bad news for home sellers keeps coming. According to CNNMoney.com, more homeowners than ever are selling their homes for a loss. This means one thing: The real estate slump is far from being over.

According to CNN, in the 12 months that ended June 30 of this year, nearly 25 percent of homes sold across the country sold for less than the sellers originally paid for the house. This, of course, is a disastrous transaction for sellers, probably only made under duress. The sellers had to sell now, and had no other options.

It’s a far cry from the real estate boom of 2001 - 2006, when sellers made astronomical profits often without even having stayed in their homes for five years.

The new real estate market is one that stresses patience: If you hope to make a large profit on your current home, be prepared to stay in it for five, seven or 10 years, at least. The days of looking at homes as giant piggybanks are over.

Real estate Web site Zillow recently published a survey that proves what I’ve long suspected: Homeowners aren’t facing reality when it comes to their own residences.

We all know that the residential real estate market is mired in a deep slump. We also know that home prices across the country are either dropping or stagnant. It seems that a majority of homeowners, though, think that it’s everybody else’s homes that are declining in value.

The Zillow survey reports that 62 percent of homeowners think that their homes have either gone up in value or stayed the same during the last year. But, according to Zillow’s own analysis of second-quarter statistics, only 19 percent of homes across the country actually increased in value, while only 5 percent stayed the same.

That leaves a lot of homes that have dropped in value.

It also leaves a lot of homeownes who refuse to accept this fact.

It’s not easy selling a home in today’s down residential market. Just scroll through this blog and you’ll read post after post on slowing home sales and dropping asking prices. So it’s especially important today to give your home every possible advantage when you put it on the market.

I’ve covered residential real estate for more than 10 years. Here are some suggestions I’ve gleamed from real estate agents for giving your home at least a fighting chance of selling.

1. Your TV shouldn’t be bigger than your couch: I know people love gigantic TVs. But when a buyer walks in, the TV shouldn’t stretch from one end of the living room to the next. That says just two things: First, the living room is too small. Secondly, the people who live here watch too much TV.

2. Put away your framed photographs of Dick Cheney: You may be an ardent fan of the current presidential administration. That’s fine. But your potential buyers may hate all things Bush with a passion. Stow your personal items. You don’t want to give buyers any reason to remember your home in a negative light. This goes for all personal items, by the way, not just political ones. You may like roosters, say, and decorate each room with roster prints, statues and bowls. Your buyers, though, may remember your house as that one cluttered with all that rooster junk.

3. Take that barking dog out of the basement: Nothing says “Get out!” like a crated dog barking in the basement. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve encountered this. You step into a house and instantly hear the dog downstairs barking. There’ll be a handwritten sign on the closed basement door warning you not to let the dog out of its crate. Like that would happen in a million years. Again, potential buyers, even if they have dogs of their own, aren’t going to remember your house in a favorable light if Fido spent their entire tour wishing he could get at their throats.

4. Cook that fish after the buyers have left: This should be obvious, but it often isn’t. Do not, under any circumstances, cook anything that doesn’t smell like apples or cinnamon before potential buyers show up. You don’t want the odors of salmon, turnips or greasy hamburger meat wafting through the air as potential buyers tour  your newly remodeled kitchen.

5. Don’t be there when the buyers are: This is crucial. Plan to be away when real estate agents are showing possible buyers through your home. Nothing makes a buyer more uncomfortable than a homeowner hanging around. After all, they can’t openly mock your cluttered bathroom if you’re standing over their shoulder, can they? Remember, buyers are envisioning how your house would look once it becomes their house. They can’t do this if you’re hanging around. So scram.

There you have it, some free advice. Don’t feel like following these simple rules? Then expect your house to sit on the market even longer.

I’ve often heard real estate agents and mortgage loan officers complain that the media have worsened the housing slump but filling their pages and airwaves with stories of rising foreclosure rates, dropping housing prices and extended sales times.

But no one can say that the editors at Crain’s Chicago Business aren’t working extra hard — maybe a bit too hard — to find the good news in the local housing market.

As its name suggests, Crain’s Chicago Business covers business news in Chicago. In its July 21 edition, the weekly ran this headline on its front page: “Home sales slump slows.” The story went on to say that though the sales of new homes in the Chicago area fell again in the second quarter, the rate of this decline slowed as a growing number of builders cut prices.

In a nutshell? Yes, the number of new-home sales is still falling, just not as quickly as it once was.

Does this qualify as good news? I guess in this real estate market, you take your good news where you can get it.

How common are housing foreclosures becoming? According to RealtyTrac, an online publisher of foreclosure data, one in every 194 U.S. households received a foreclosure filing during the first quarter of the year.

In case you were unsure, that is a very high number. In fact, according to RealtyTrac, foreclosure filings were made on 649,917 properties in the first quarter, a 23 percent increase from the fourth quarter of last year and a whopping 112 percent increase from the same time one year earlier.

You can read the bad news at RealtyTrac’s site here.

To be clear, not all of the foreclosure filings last quarter will result in people losing their homes. The foreclosure activity that RealtyTrac covers includes default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions. Still, it’s a mess out there in the residential world.

Foreclosures, remember, don’t help anybody. The banks don’t want these homes back, especially in today’s weak residential market. But it looks, unfortunately, like foreclosure activity won’t be slowing anytime soon. This is one bad real estate market that’s showing few, if any, signs of lessening.

Now that spring is here, despite the snow on my Midwest front lawn, we’ll see how deep the residential real estate market’s slump is.

Spring has traditionally been the time of year when agents sell the most homes. Last spring, of course, was a slow one. This year? My bet is it’ll be slow, too. But I’m hoping that sales are stronger than they were last year.

Any improvement in spring sales will be a good omen that, though the real estate slowdown is far from over, there are better times ahead.

Spring is the season of hope, right? Let’s all hope that the country is slowly coming out of its real estate slump.