Danielle Sullivan faced a financial crisis. In August, the mortgage lender she worked for bellied up without paying its employees. By November, the 29-year-old broker had lost her second job and was starting a third. The payments on her four-bedroom home in Phoenix suburb began to pile up.

Searching for a bailout, Sullivan found a website that promised to rent her house to cash-flush Super Bowl fans. A week later she held a check for $3,200—four nights’ rent for a place twenty miles away from the University of Phoenix stadium in Glendale, Arizona, where the big game will be played Sunday.

“I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have this,” says Sullivan, who closed on her $400,000 home a little more than a year ago. “I paid this month’s mortgage and the next.”

Sullivan is among potentially thousands of homeowners in the greater Phoenix area who, in perhaps the greatest sign of desperation in the housing market, are leaning on prospects of a Super Bowl windfall—in some dire cases, to rescue them from foreclosure. “It’s their last resort,” says Blaine Wiggins, owner of bigeventrentals.com, which lists over 170 homes. “The Super Bowl is in their back yard, so why not recoup a year’s worth of payments?”

Ads on sites like Craigslist and those of a cottage industry of new rental agencies list last-minute rentals—from a $25,000-a-week condo to a downtown penthouse, complete with limousine service and concierge, for $100,000. One real estate investor managed to rent his $4 million, 12,000-square-foot mansion for $40,000. In that case there was no risk of default, but the house had been on the market since last spring.

“When the wheels stopped everybody got caught,” says its owner, who asked not to be named. Another ad for a three-bedroom home at an upscale Scottsdale golf resort reads: “This is a rough market! I will do anything to save my home.... You will have service 24 hours a day...from a young, fit, beautiful, thin cheerleader.”
 
“It probably means they’re in a pretty bad way,” says Daren Blomquist, a spokesman for RealtyTrac, an industry firm that counts and deals in foreclosures. “It’s a market that was red hot and is experiencing hard times and a pretty dramatic pullback from that period of excess.”

Foreclosures in Maricopa County alone, RealtyTrac says, are up almost 40 percent since December, and nearly 200 percent since 2006, twice the national average. According to the National Association of Realtors, median home sale prices in the Phoenix area are down more than 4 percent in the last quarter, among the worst rates in the nation’s cities. Across Phoenix, spec houses sit empty, second and third homes have been languishing for sale since summer, and a growing number of people who invested in multiple properties are having a tough time holding on to their own homes. (See which cities have been hit hardest by the fall in housing prices.)

Mike Roberts, an investor and mortgage broker in Scottsdale, Arizona, bought two homes when it seemed nothing could go wrong—a four-bedroom house in an exclusive Scottsdale subdivision, and another in nearby West Valley. Both have been for sale, or lease, or whichever came first, for months without offers. Now he’s hoping to rent the Scottsdale home, which he lives in, for Super Bowl week.

“It’s not a way out, but a way to stop some of the bleeding,” he says. Roberts began asking $10,000 for the rental, then lowered it to $7,000 with no results. Now, he says, he’ll let it go for a mere $3,500. But by midweek, he hadn’t even had one call on the property. “I can’t sustain too much more. If I don’t get it rented we’re looking at just a few months.”

That’s the kind of crisis JulieAnn Stone hopes to avoid. Stone is a Realtor, and when the market was hot, as she puts it, “the greed factor kicked in.” She owned a condo in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb. She bought another in Scottsdale, a third out of state, and finally a fourth property—a luxurious five-bedroom home in an upscale Glendale development—with the intentions of flipping all of them for a profit.

In Glendale, just a mile and a half from the stadium, she has taken out two mortgages, pulling out as much equity as possible in order to renovate her properties and keep her business afloat. Now, the $10,000 in monthly payments threatens to drag her under too.

“A lot of us thought that leveraging the stuff that we had was the best way as the market kept going up and up and up,” she says. “I remember my simple life.” To turn things around, Stone founded a new business, Jewelstone, a staging service for empty properties and a luxury rental brokerage set up, in part, to market for the Super Bowl. But that last component has also been a lesson in recalibrating her expectations. She has rented just four properties for game week, all for just a fraction of what she had hoped. The big Super Bowl rental plan has been anything but a Hail Mary, she says.

In fact, it’s mostly been “a whole a lot of hype.”