Sunday’s Oscar tribute to late director John Hughes served as a reminder that the Ferris Bueller house is still on the market.

In the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” the steel and glass house in the forested Chicago suburb of Highland Park was used as the home for Bueller’s friend, Cameron. A glass pavilion overlooking the wooded hillside served as a garage for Cameron’s father’s ill-fated Ferrari.

Known locally as “the Ben Rose House,” the property was designed by architects A. James Speyer and David Haid, well-known protégés of Mies van der Rohe. The house was built in 1953 and the pavilion added a few years later.

A Miami firm promoting Florida real estate investments was actually running a $135 million Ponzi scheme, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged this week.

Gaston Cantens and his wife, Teresita, founders of Royal West Properties, promised investors returns between 9 and 16 percent a year on property in southwest Florida markets like Cape Coral, Port Charlotte and Lehigh Acres. But when the bottom fell out of the market the Cantens began using new investor money to pay off earlier investors, the SEC alleges in its civil complaint.

A subsidiary of Dubai World turned over ownership of New York’s famed Knickerbocker building to lenders this week, after defaulting on mortgage payments.

Istithmar World Capital, an investment arm of state-controlled Dubai World, paid $300 million for the Times Square icon in 2006. The company said it wanted to turn the office building into a luxury hotel.

Instead, Denmark-based Danske Bank assumed control of property this week and hired Jones Lang Lasalle to sell it. Danske took over the mortgage in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Reuters reports.

The new owner of the Trump Towers in Miami is discounting units up to 30 percent, hoping to sell off units and pay down the newly acquired debt.

“It’s like a relaunch,” Dezer Properties president Gil Dezer told the Miami Herald.

Dezer Properties assumed control of the project in January from its former partner, Related Group, which not long ago was building condo towers in Miami like kids with a Lego set. Now Related is busily working out deals with lenders, bailing out of several of its high profile projects, including the must-discussed Icon Brickell towers.

Before the crisis, developers cited robust sales in Trump Towers, the three-tower, 813-unit waterfront project, which is licensing Donald Trump’s name. But many buyers didn’t close on the sales, Dezer told the Herald.

Actress, activist and first-class Hollywood diva Sharon Stone has joined a long-list of Hollywood celebrities facing big losses in the real estate market.

Stone, who has lost some of her A-list movie glam in recent years, is offering a Beverly Hills estate for $8.995--$2 million less than she paid for the property in 2006, reports the always reliable go-to source for celebestate, RealEstalker.

It’s unclear whether Stone ever actually lived in the 4.85-acre estate, which includes a Mediterranean-style, 6,640-square-foot house with five bedrooms and six bathrooms, in addition to a two bedroom guest house. Must-have amenities include a “state of the art” media room, four fireplaces and a workout room,

U2 guitarist The Edge publically defended his 156-acre development on the California coastline this week, denying charges his plans will be an environmental disaster.

The Edge

“We just had this dream of building a house that was in perfect harmony with these hills,” Edge told the New York Times. “We see it as something that could be a bench mark of sustainability.”

Unfortunately for the legendary guitar hero and Bono sidekick, many of his neighbors in Malibu see theproject as a bench mark for destroying habitats and view corridors.

Edge’s plan calls for five homes ranging from 7,317 square feet to 12,004 square feet, including a 1,600-foot long road snaking up the hillside. Neighbors and conservationists are irritated by several aspects of the project, but the idea of the 20-foot wide road draws special criticism.

More than $4.5 million was recently cut from the listing price for the Ennis House, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic home creations.

Perched in the hills above Los Angeles, the landmark house, built in 1924, uses Wright’s signature textile concrete brick design, creating a house that is part cool art deco and part Mayan temple.

The house was originally listed at $15 million last year, after the foundation controlling the property decided it could no longer afford the preservation effort. But the price was recently cut to $10.495 million, creating what listing agent Christie’s Great Estates calls an “unprecedented value proposition for a buyer with a vision and a passion for historic architecture.”

Lenders foreclosed this week on the site for the oft-delayed Trump Towers Atlanta, which was getting the Trumponian sales push three years ago.

The land for the project could be sold at auction as early as next month, according to local press reports.

Hailed as The Donald’s first foray into Atlanta, the first phase of the project featured a 48-story tower with 360 condominium units, priced between $500,000 and $1.6 million. In 2007, “after just weeks since the opening” of the sales center, the Trump Towers Atlanta was “nearly one-third sold,” a  press release proclaimed. Construction was set to begin in 2007 with a grand opening planned for 2020.

Shanghai Financial Center

Despite the economic downturn, 2010 will see more skyscrapers completed around the world than in any single year in history, according to the organization that tracks the industry.

More than 100 buildings of 200 meters or taller are due to finish this year, which is more than the total already in existence in New York and Hong Kong combined, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat says.

“It is not just height, but the sheer volume of high-rise buildings set to be completed in 2010 that is astonishing,” the organization reports.

In many ways, the flurry of activity in 2010 is simply a fluke, the delayed residue of the go-go years, when these projects were financed. In 2009, the number of completed skyscrapers fell by 28 percent from 2008, thanks, in large part, to the unprecedented number of skyscrapers built in the United Arab Emirates in 2008.

Despite all the training seminars, self-help sessions and best practice tutorials, it never ceases to amaze me how badly some real estate industry professionals handle basic customer service.

This week I encountered a fairly typical example, which may sound familiar to many people in the industry. It happened in Austin, Texas, but it could ring true anywhere in the world.

My wife and I toured condos in our area that are due to be auctioned in a couple of weeks. The next day I received the obligatory follow-up e-mail from a representative of the preferred mortgage lender, pitching her company’s services.