Local officials are cold to the idea and the prison agency says it's not even interested. But the aggressive marketing campaign shows how wide some brokers are casting their nets for buyers in the nationwide housing and mortgage slump.

"We're anxious to sell the property and just get the highest possible price," said David B. Wills, vice president of Lanham-based NAI Michael Companies Inc. "That's our job."

Wills said Friday that his company is representing Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial Services Group Inc., which acquired the 220-acre parcel in a foreclosure sale for $9 million in March 2007. The previous owner had planned to build more than 1,400 homes on the site, which is zoned for a combination of residential and agricultural use.

The property, called Mount Aetna Farms, lies just east of Hagerstown between Hagerstown Community College and the Robinwood Medical Center. Housing developments bracket at least two sides, and a new Washington County Hospital is under construction nearby.

Wills acknowledged that the site is more likely to become a retirement community, a high school or a technology training center than a prison. But he said that with real estate sales so slow, "we're brainstorming and reaching out to anyone and everyone."

He said the previous owner proposed high-density housing on the site at a time of booming home sales in Hagerstown, about 70 miles from both Washington and Baltimore.

Now home construction has stalled, and NAI Michael is pitching the property to anyone it can think of.

Foreclosure filings in Maryland were up 33 percent in May compared with a year earlier, according to foreclosure listing service RealtyTrac Inc. One in every 979 Maryland homes received a foreclosure filing, which was better than the national rate of one per 483, RealtyTrac said.

"We have even spoken with the Bureau of Prisons to determine if Hagerstown would be an appropriate location for another Federal Detention Center," Wills and two associates wrote in a letter to the Hagerstown City Council.

Three council members quickly rejected the idea Tuesday, pointing out that there are three state prisons a few miles south of Hagerstown.

"Not in my lifetime," Councilwoman Penny M. Nigh told The Hagerstown Herald-Mail.

Washington County Planning Director Michael Thompson called the prison idea "a stretch."

"Realistically, sticking something like that out in the middle of that area is really not the best place to put it, in my mind," he said.

But Thompson said a federal or state agency would have an advantage over a private buyer seeking to build anything but homes on the land: local zoning regulations don't apply to government owners.