It was the hottest buy in town.

The Cherry Lane Condos has just come on the market in September 2006 as the median resale home in Manteca hit $410,000. It was just $3,000 away from the market’s peak.

People were willing to pay $250,000 for 800-quare-foot homes accessed from alleys.

That - and the fact there was almost nothing available under $300,000 - made the conversion of the apartments into condos at Union Road and Cherry Lane look appealing to those desperately trying to buy shelter.

As a result, the condos - typically consisting of 941 square feet with two bedrooms and one bathroom - were fetching just under $220,000. They had started out at $190,000 just months earlier and were rapidly climbing in value.

It is a much different story six years later.

What was once the hottest residential property in Manteca is now on the bottom of the heap in terms of what they will command in today’s housing market.

The condos that once sold for $233 per square foot go begging today at as little as $39.50 per square foot. Meanwhile, the overall median asking price for existing housing currently for sale in Manteca is $93 per square foot.

Several units are being offered for sale ranging from $37,200 to $45,000. The lowest asking price represents an 83.14 percent decline in value in six years.

The Cherry Lane condo sellers have been the most realistic since the housing bubble burst. In 2008, they quickly dropped to $60,000 - a drop twice as sharp as conventional housing - promoting a flurry of sales.

They appeared to have hit bottom in January of 2010 when units that sold closed escrow for $44,900. At that point the condos had plunged 78.6 in value over four years compared to overall housing values in Manteca that had dropped 57 percent during the same time going from $413,000 to $178,000.

Since then the selling price of existing homes that have closed escrow has rebounded slightly by just over one percent to $179,950 by the end of 2011. The condos, though, have dropped between 5 and 12 percent in value.

A 30-year loan for $40,000 plus annual taxes and insurance would translate into $275 a month for a condo. That sounds great but there are only two big problems: You can’t get a FHA loan for them since the complex is more than 50 percent investor owned. And as for investors, they have to put a substantial amount down.

But even if someone puts up $40,000 in cash or a combination of a loan and down payment, the units are renting for excess of $700 providing $8,400 in cash a year making them appealing to some investors.