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.)