In London, for example, it looks like there is serious overbuilding already.

Industry experts tend to agree that overbuilding may not be a problem.

So far, the classic signs of overbuilding have not emerged.

"You don't have the problems of regional overbuilding, as do those cities," he said.

But even that segment is now losing ground because of tremendous overbuilding.

So you have this enormous overbuilding, which will take a fairly long time to overcome.

How a planned economy managed to foster such overbuilding is not entirely clear.

We have had substantial overbuilding throughout the country and hence new construction will move slowly during the next three years.

When it became clear that overbuilding had brought a glut to the market, they stepped back.

And, some analysts say, the kind of widespread overbuilding that characterized the property business in the 1980's will be less likely.

We had enormous overbuilding in just about every city in the country."

Brokers and bank officers blame speculative overbuilding for the market's poor performance this year.

The overbuilding threatens water wildlife and the ecosystems of fragile wetlands.

"As such, we are not seeing the overbuilding that we saw in previous cycles."

On the other hand, areas where there was intense overbuilding, like Arizona, will be extremely slow to show any sign of renewal.

Today, despite the overbuilding, the construction machine still rolls along, seemingly on autopilot.

But New England had other economic factors at work that worsened the overbuilding.

The overbuilding coincided with other trends that reduced the supply of shoppers.

The oil boom was over, and there had been a dramatic overbuilding of drilling rigs.

"There's no overbuilding, rents are going up, and Wall Street is still growing," he said.

That overbuilding was attributed largely to the lavish tax breaks real estate got in 1981.

Economists said the lackluster performance was a result of rising interest rates and previous overbuilding in many regions.

Little overbuilding has shown up in the residential market, and economists say office vacancy rates reached their current levels a year or two ago.

Intense competition and overbuilding has made prying profits out of building those pipes difficult.

The massive overbuilding of shopping complexes during the 1970's has left America "over-malled."

There's not enough sites in the city to overbuild if we wanted two."

"There's a great temptation to overbuild in the real estate area."

"We did not overbuild office space, especially in the downtown area, so the investment market thinks this is a great place," he said.

The chemical industry will be competitive only if we do not overbuild."

"But we also don't want them to overbuild on this piece of land.

Engineers would overbuild routes to ensure they were prepared for growth.

Discipline in capital markets, they say, has prevented any tendency to overbuild.

We have seen cycles before where the construction industry tends to overbuild, and then goes through a fallow period.

One is the industry's apparent tendency to overbuild.

"We don't want to overbuild the city," he said.

The others didn't overbuild, so when Christmas was disappointing, there was less of an adjustment.

"The industry is definitely going to overbuild," he said, "they have in the past and they will in the future."

"They can't overbuild for the neighborhood because of the preponderance of higher- priced homes up to 2,200 square feet," she said.

And one of the worst things that could happen would be for our facilities to freeze up; if we overbuild, that won't happen.

"You Cardassians overbuild and do so in triplicate.

In many places there's only one suitable pipe into the customer's home--and it is uneconomic to try to overbuild.

"We made a very deliberate decision to overbuild, although we hoped we were overbuilding by a little bit," he said.

Experts say the change means new companies will be more responsive to tenants, have more money to maintain and buy properties and probably will not overbuild.

The reconnaissance flights could build confidence that opposing armies are not being massed across the border, while restraining temptations to overbuild forces against the unknown.

To expand the local airport and overbuild hotels would destroy the setting that makes Angkor Wat unique.

Mr. Fyhr said stricter environmental regulations for tankers would force the industry to retire older ships in coming years, mitigating the tendency to overbuild.

"Everybody says we didn't overbuild," Mr. Bach of Grubb & Ellis said.

"When you overbuild," said Bob Tripolsky, the communications manager at Chevrolet, there is a "likelihood of reducing the mystique of the cars."

Mr. Himmel said mixed-use developments such as CityPlace sometimes must intentionally overbuild in their first phases to capture public attention.

But State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, a Brooklyn Democrat, said the project "seeks to overbuild and destroy the communities around it."