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There isn't much to look at yet other than the foundation, but Misty Shaw stops several times each week to check on the progress of her new home at Lakeside Ridge, an East Side development she previously wrote off as too expensive.

"When I looked in March, they had dropped their prices $40,000," said Shaw, who has been living in a rental home with her husband and children and spent more than a year looking for a house.

"We could get the house we wanted," she said about her new 1,800-square-foot home, which cost about $220,000 "We could build it the way we wanted it to be."

With local home prices dropping, buyers such as Shaw are reveling in their opportunity to call the shots, shopping around prodigiously and not taking anything less than what they want.

Some of the winners in the housing slump are first-time buyers or others who felt priced out of the market during the run-up.

Foreign buyers, especially Canadians, and investors and retirees also are active in the market, looking for bargains, local real estate industry observers said. And some Mexican nationals are becoming more interested in investing in Tucson, Long Realty agent Richie Cardenas said.

"The buyers have come out of the hiding," said Troy Goodwin, a Coldwell Banker agent.

But for sellers, there's a catch:

"The prices are coming down now," Goodwin said.

Although the housing slowdown has been entrenched for more than a year, the median and average prices have not shown much decline until recently.

In April, the median price dropped about 13 percent from the previous year to $195,000, according to statistics from the Tucson Association of Realtors Multiple Listing Service. Real estate agents say sellers are finally starting to price their homes "correctly."

"We're starting to see properties that are priced correctly having bidding wars," Realty Executives agent Aaron Wilson said.

While some real estate agents still are struggling, business is booming for Coldwell Banker agent Keith Cobb, who handles many first-time buyers.

Last year, Cobb's team handled 111 sales. For the first four months of this year, he already was at 58.

First-time buyers have been a good market during the slump because they don't have to worry about selling existing homes, real estate agents said. Many have been helped by government-backed financing options such as Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Benefits Administration loans, which were seldom accepted by sellers during the housing boom, agents said.

"Two years ago, the housing pricing was way out of control," said Jason Maleski, a 29-year-old first-time buyer who works for Enterprise Rent-a-Car. "Now I think it's adjusted back to make housing affordable."

Tucson ranked 139th out of 223 cities in housing affordability in the first quarter of this year, with 53 percent of homes considered to be affordable for people earning the median income, according to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index.

Phoenix ranked higher in affordability at No. 113 in the country, with about 60 percent of homes affordable for people making the median income.

No matter what type of houses they were looking for, buyers said they took their time to see as much as the market had to offer them.

Before finding a deal in Lakeside Ridge, Shaw looked at somewhere between 75 and 100 homes.

Stephen Kenny, a winter-home buyer from Calgary, Alberta, gave himself only a few days to look for a house but managed to see 20 to 30 before settling on a home in the historic El Montevideo neighborhood, in central Tucson.

"We were actually going to buy one probably next year," said Kenny, a technology entrepreneur. "But our (Canadian) dollar back in late 2007 took a real spike, and of course the market is soft down here."

Although prices are starting to come down, buyers said many existing homes still seem overpriced, especially for some older homes and fixer-uppers.

"A lot of them I thought were priced pretty high for what they were and what you were getting," said Samantha Klein, a 27-year-old teacher of eighth-grade math. Klein recently closed on a 1,600-square-foot home near East Broadway and Columbus Boulevard for $185,000.

Shaw, who is building the home in Lakeside Ridge, said she was surprised by some of the problems she saw in resale homes. One, she was told, had wiring problems and would blow a fuse if the washing machine and dishwasher were run at the same time.

"That was the kind of thing we ran into with older homes," she said.

Another house, owned by a California investor, Shaw considered overpriced. She put in a bid for about $25,000 less than the asking price, and "they didn't even counter," she said. "Their house is still up for sale."

Choosy or not, buyers are a welcome sight for real estate agents after more than a year of slumping sales. Some agents say they expect to see sales numbers — if not prices — turn around in the coming months.

Sales are "on fire" in less far-flung areas of the Southeast Side, even though prices aren't rising, said Wilson, the Realty Executives agent. In the 85747 ZIP code, east of South Houghton Road, there is only about 3.6 months' worth of inventory available, compared with about nine months' of inventory for Tucson overall, Wilson said.

But likely as a result of higher gasoline prices, the same is not true in areas farther away, such as Corona de Tucson and Vail, he said.

"The buyers are not out there," Wilson said.

Early signs of improvement in other markets around the country may be helping Tucson, too, said Sherie Broekema, a Long Realty agent who specializes in retirees and winter-home buyers.

Slow sales elsewhere kept many retirees from selling their homes and buying in Tucson, she said. So far, she hasn't handled a single sale for a retiree this year.

But things are starting to look up.

Alexandria, Va., retiree Sara Bieber is searching for a home under $400,000 with Broekema's help.

"We thought we would end up having to delay the plans, but actually our house sold Thursday," Bieber said. "All of the sudden it's picked up."