A report from ABC 4 in Utah. “ABC4 spoke with Rodney M., a local real estate agent in Salt Lake County. ‘We’re seeing the inventory of houses double on the market,’ said Rodney.’This has made it easier for homebuyers to be pickier and also reduce the price of mortgages. People no longer have to bring a bunch of cash and get into a bidding war to buy a home.’”
From Twin Falls KMVT. “With the market slowing down from a record pace, Mark Johnson with JPAR Real Estate says he is not pointing to a change in demand, especially in places like Idaho. Instead, he is pointing to one national trend that may be causing the slowed market. ‘We’re increasing inventory by 4-6% every week, and I anticipate that will happen through the end of summer,’ said Johnson.”
“In southern Idaho, everything is sold or reserved before construction is even finished. So what would have to happen here in the Magic Valley to see something like that occur? ‘New construction,’ said Lisa Haney with 208 Real Estate. ‘I think they are finally starting to catch up. I know builders would quit taking orders for new build jobs because they couldn’t keep up. I think we’re finally starting to see a little more saturation in both of those markets.’”
From WCVB in Massachusetts. “It has been a brutal spring for anyone trying to buy a house in Greater Boston. Now, experts say there might be some early signs the market is starting to downshift. Denise Garzone points out that bidding wars are less intense than just a few months ago. She says most listings get a handful of offers — three or four — compared to more than a dozen which was commonplace just a few months ago. ‘We’re not seeing the hordes of people come through open houses anymore,’ Garzone said. ‘Far fewer people coming to look at houses. Far fewer offers.’”
The Review Journal. “Homebuilders’ sales activity dropped sharply in Southern Nevada last month as buyers around the country pull back amid higher borrowing costs. Locally, builders logged 911 net sales — new purchase contracts minus cancellations — in Southern Nevada in April, down nearly 30 percent from March, according to Home Builders Research. Realty One Group agent Judi Hirsh said Las Vegas remains a seller’s market overall, given the still-tight inventory of listings, but the market is ‘softening’ and isn’t experiencing the ‘craziness’ of even a few months ago.”
The Puget Sound Business Journal in Washington. “Four years ago Daniels Real Estate rolled out a plan to sell a dozen Seattle condos in the new Gridiron building at below-market prices. ‘We thought these would fly off the shelf,’ Kevin Daniels said in a May 10 email interview. They have not. Even after cutting prices, ‘(we) can’t even give them away, it seems.’”
The San Mateo Daily Journal in California. “Spiking interest rates may be slowing San Mateo County’s red-hot housing market, with mortgage demand falling and local real estate agents reporting a cooling in competition over the Peninsula’s limited housing stock. ‘We’re starting to see there’s less foot traffic at the open houses, there’s less private tourings and also there’s less offers,’ said San Mateo Realtor Wilson Leung. ‘We’re starting to see the effects of interest.’”
“Another ingredient for a price dip, at least in the short term, is a seasonal inventory increase. Just 250 homes were listed for sale in the entire county in January, according to MLS listings. That figure has increased steadily, with 414 homes shown on the market last month, and Leung said he expects it to continue to increase through September.For now, he said most of his listings are getting just a few offers, down from eight or more earlier in the year. ‘The habit is to price below the going rate, but even with that … there are single-family properties that are not getting offers after two weekends,’ he said. ‘I think the hike in prices is behind us.’”
From Insauga in Canada. “For decades, broker Robert Van Rhijn said, two key measures of momentum in the GTA housing market – sold transactions and total inventory – have typically peaked between March and May. A third key metric, average days on market, typically hits its lowest levels over the same period each year. But those key metrics dipped during what is typically the strongest time of year for GTA housing sales. Sold transactions plummeted from 4010 in February to just 990 in April. Terminated listings spiked in late April, with 567 properties being pulled from the market between April 26 and May 2.”
“According to Galina Sheveleva, a realtor at Strata.ca, the relatively high number of terminated listings indicates that many sellers did not receive the kind of ‘way-over-asking’ offers that made headlines during what he described as the ‘insane’ first quarter of 2022. With much of that ‘insane’ first quarter action came from pandemic-fuelled volatility, it would have been understandable for GTA real estate watchers to expect the spring market of 2022 to return to form. But this simply hasn’t happened.”
“Instead, just about every measure of market performance peaked from January to March before dipping in April and early May. At the same time, terminated listings spiked oddly in late April, with 567 properties being pulled from the market between April 26 and May 2.”
From CBC News in Canada. “The home-buying frenzy of the pandemic is showing some signs of slowing, with the number of home sales in Saskatchewan dropping last month by almost 17 per cent compared to the record set in April of last year. ‘Places where you’re talking about buying a half duplex for $2.5 million … need some correction,’ said Ashley Turner, a realtor with Century 21 in Saskatoon. ‘And that’s going to happen with … interest rates going up, the government trying to cool off those housing markets.’”
From Newsroom New Zealand. “Up to 2.5 percent of vendors are now losing money when they sell their homes. Nationwide sales figures show the worst loss last month was suffered by a vendor in Henderson Valley, in west Auckland, who in November 2020 purchased a very small three-bedroom cottage on 1588 square metres of native forested land sloping down towards Stoney Stream, for $1.1 million.”
“Just 18 months later on April 22, she sold it for $1.025m – that’s $75,000 less than she paid, and on paper it’s also a $95,000 discount on the June 2021 rateable value of $1.12m. And that doesn’t allow for the money she spent renovating it, and the real estate agent’s commission when she sold it. Worse still for her morale, that’s half a million dollars below the (somewhat optimistic) $1.54m Homes.co.nz estimate of what it would have sold for just two months earlier, though that says more about the unreliability of such pricing sites.”
“Ann Hutton from LJ Hooker marketed the property, and said the drop in price was essentially an act of God. ‘I think so. If you’d been selling October, November last year, what you may have achieved then and what you want to achieve now, is probably completely different,’ she said. ‘I think it’s just an adjustment. If people need to sell or want to sell and you know, they have personal needs to sell, whatever they may be, then it’s really just a case of, you know, not expecting to see what you were likely to see in November last year and meet the current market.’”
From Domain News in Australia. “There are always exceptions, even in a property boom. Domain found that NSW, Victoria, Queensland, ACT, the Northern Territory and Western Australia each have a clutch of suburbs where prices are actually cheaper now than what they were in 2017 – significantly, in some cases. In the upper north shore suburb of Epping, where the median price for a unit is 7.7 per cent less now than what it was five years ago, agent Betty Ockerlander said a big influx of new apartment buildings led to an oversupply in the area that peaked around 2016.”
“‘They just kept building them and then there was an oversupply, so I’d say there are another few years to go before it evens out,’ she said. Perth’s biggest price fall over five years, however, was for units in Victoria Park, a south-side suburb located just 10 minutes from the CBD. The cost of a median-priced unit there is now 26.3 per cent less than it was in March 2017. The current median is just $295,000. Local agent Joe Mucci of Bourkes agency said it’s a secret that needs telling. ‘We just don’t get enough inquiry. A few years ago I sold one for $340,000. You can now buy it for $270,000,’ he said.”
From CNBC. “Chinese real estate defaults have increased so much that Goldman Sachs analysts have shifted to their worst-case scenario for the riskiest part of the market. Twenty-two China high-yield bond issuers, all related to the property sector, have either defaulted on their U.S. dollar-denominated bonds or deferred repayment with bond exchanges since the start of this year, analysts Kenneth Ho and Chakki Ting wrote in a report Friday. ‘Given the pick up in stresses, we raise our FY22 China Property HY default rate forecast to 31.6% (from 19.0% previously), which was our previous bear case assumption,’ the analysts said.”