A report from the Spokesman Review in Washington. “‘Real estate is a cyclical thing. What goes up, must come down,’ Rob Higgins, executive officer for the Realtors association said of the local housing market. Spokane County’s overheated housing market appears to finally be cooling as inventory spiked and sales in July recorded the greatest year-over-year decrease in more than a decade. Last month’s median was a $30,000 drop from the all-time high of $450,000 recorded in May. ‘Sellers are still getting market value, but what they aren’t seeing is offers 20 to 30% above list price,’ said Tom Hormel, 2023 president-elect for the Spokane Association of Realtors.”
The Las Vegas Sun in Nevada. “For a second straight month, the median price for an existing home has declined, according to a report released today by the Las Vegas Realtors trade group. ‘We’re seeing a shift in the housing market,’ Brandon Roberts, president of Las Vegas Realtors, said in a statement. ‘We haven’t seen prices slow down like this in several years, and we haven’t had this many homes available for sale since 2019.’ At the end of July, the Las Vegas Realtors report showed just over 7,300 homes listed without an offer, up 144% from July 2021.”
The Idaho Statesman. “Statistics from July provide more evidence of a cooling housing market in Boise. A primary reason for the slowdown is an increase in supply. At the end of July, there were 2,408 homes for sale, a 128.2% increase from July 2021 and the most since September 2015, according to the Boise Regional Realtors. Competition for houses is tapering off. Sellers have accepted lower offers, reduced prices and made concessions, the Boise Regional Realtors reported. When competition peaked last year, buyers routinely were forced to pay more than the list price to buy a home. In July 2021, sellers received 101.3% of the original list price. This July, however, buyers paid an average of 95.6% of list.”
KTVZ in Oregon. “A two-month supply of housing stock as seen in the Bend-Redmond area last month might not sound like a lot, but it’s the highest level in two years, Beacon Appraisal Group reported in the July Beacon Report. Redmond’s median home sales price, meanwhile, dipped by $25,000 in July, but the $505,000 median sales price is just $23,000 below the record $538,000 figure set in April.”
The Ahwatukee Foothills News in Arizona. “The balance between supply and demand is now so tilted toward buyers, that they could be now calling the shots in Buckeye, Queen Creek and Maricopa, the Cromford Report said, adding that it may depend on their experience in the real estate game. ‘Here buyers now hold a distinct negotiating advantage and have a total of 2,243 active single-family detached listings to choose from,’ it said. ‘This compares with 675 just three months ago.’”
“The Cromford Report identified five other communities whether neither buyer nor seller has a distinct advantage in sale negotiations. They include Tempe, Chandler, Surprise, Peoria and Gilbert. But it’s sellers in those five areas that need to be a little nervous, it added. ‘Astute sellers will realize that the situation is very fluid and slipping away from them,’ the report said. The report said Scottsdale is appearing as it will soon join the overall trend dominating the rest of the Valley.”
“‘Prices have looked wobbly for the last two months,’ it said. ‘But as buyers start to flex their muscles, we should be prepared for more serious consequences. While we cannot forecast accurately several months out, it would be reasonable based on current trends to expect significant declines in average prices, median prices and average price per square foot by the end of 2022. Current trends can – and often do – change, so this is not baked in, just a reasonable base case.’”
Fox 26 on Texas. “In the heat of summer, Houston’s housing market is cooling down, a bit, as record high prices and rising interest rates have taken their toll. It reflects a national trend that sees a growing number of homes on the market and pickier buyers. ‘Whenever they’re in escrow, maybe they see a rate hike; maybe they think home prices will go down,’ says Charlie Mackey, from real estate broker Sundae, ‘They feel some sense of buyer’s remorse because of the inventory and because of the mortgage rate volatility.’”
The Los Angeles Times in California. “Katy Perry is officially out of Beverly Crest. The pop star just unloaded the main house for $18 million — the same price she paid for it in 2017.”
The Detroit Free Press. “Pontiac-based United Wholesale Mortgage has been staying profitable during the current downturn in the U.S. mortgage market and moderately reducing its employee headcount. The nation’s No. 2 mortgage lender by volume, UWM on Tuesday reported $215 million in net income, or profit, during the second quarter. That was down from $453 million in the first quarter, although higher than the company’s $139 million net income in the second quarter of 2021, back when mortgage rates were still under 3% and the housing market was booming.”
“‘We’ve been waiting for this time in the industry where rates went up,’ said UWM CEO Mat Ishbia. ‘They went up fast, everyone else was kind of caught doing the refi game and the merry-go-round with doing the refinance all day — that doesn’t work for a long-term strategy, and you’re seeing it right now.’”
From Yahoo Finance. “Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman joins Yahoo Finance Live: Well, it was really dramatic in May and June. I think it was underreported in the press. Housing used to be a very stable asset class. And now it’s extremely volatile. And one reason for that is that it used to be that institutions accounted for about a quarter of the sales. But now it’s about 1/3. You have more builder activity. You have iBuyers. You have real estate investment trusts, all active in the single family home market. An iBuyer is going to price ahead of the market and mark it down every week until it sells.”
“Now it’s about 1/3 of institutions accounting for sales, but that includes builders, too. Builders are very aggressive about selling their homes when they see inventory piling up… If you look at Boise, Salt Lake, Denver, more than half the listings in June were marked down, which is a record. I think in Salt Lake City, it was 62 and 1/2%, which is just crazy. So there were so many people who were pricing ahead of the market, looking at what happened last month and thinking it will happen next month. And they were just caught straddling a real correction in the market. It has been hard to have a reckoning with these folks. They think about what happened in October last year, what they saw their neighbor get in February of this year. And they still want that, and they can’t get it.”
From Insauga. “The real estate market continues its downward trend in Mississauga as experts predict the deepest decline in 50 years across Canada. In Mississauga, the July 2022 benchmark price for a single-family detached home was $1,601,000, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board July report. That’s a drop of $73,800 from June’s benchmark price of $1,674,800. ‘In the Toronto and Vancouver areas, the decline in activity is quickly becoming one of the deepest of the past half a century,’ the RBC August housing report notes. ‘Prices are sliding fast, and the exuberance that permeated these markets earlier this year is being replaced by fear.’”
The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. “Parts of Melbourne including Broadmeadows, Craigieburn and Cranbourne and suburbs of Sydney including Blacktown, Dolls Point and Riverstone all are at risk of feeling the most pain from the RBA’s aggressive monetary policy tightening. More than 360,000 first-time buyers entered the property market between March 2020 and June this year. Almost 110,000 of them were in Victoria while 87,000 were in NSW, taking advantage of generous government assistance and record-low interest rates.”
“It’s those buyers – who entered a market in which prices rose at their fastest in more than three decades – experts believe are most at risk as interest rates climb and real wages fall. In Melbourne’s Toorak, values climbed by 11.1 per cent through the pandemic but have fallen 10 per cent over recent months. It’s a similar story in nearby Armadale (up by 11.6 per cent through the pandemic but down 10.4 per cent) and Hawthorn (13 per cent increase but a subsequent 8.6 per cent drop).”
“In Sydney, values lifted by 9.5 per cent in Lakemba through COVID but have since fallen 7 per cent. Macquarie Park values jumped by 17.5 per cent but have since gone backward by 11.9 per cent while in Chippendale values went up 18.2 per cent but have given back 10 per cent. ‘I think households may be concerned about how they’re going to pay their mortgages going forward,’ said S&P Global senior director Narelle Coneybeare. ‘We do think there will be people who are going to struggle with these higher rates but it’s probably a small cohort at this stage.’”
The South China Morning Post. “Langfang, a Chinese city in Hebei Province situated between Beijing and Tianjin, has rolled back home-buying restrictions as it seeks to boost a housing market that is flagging amid rising economic headwinds. ‘In recent years, the transaction volume and prices of Langfang’s housing stock have dropped significantly. From a peak in 2017 to the present, prices of many developments have fallen by half or more,’ said Li Yujia, a senior economist at the Guangdong Urban and Rural Planning and Design Institute, a policy advisory body. ‘In popular areas, such a large drop is very rare.’”