A report from USA Today. “‘A lot of the places, the Zoom towns that rose really rapidly in prices are cooling very rapidly and there’s been a pretty swift change,’ says Redfin Economist Sheharyar Bokhari. ‘Price drops are increasing, and it’s all been driven by the mortgage rates going up. And the Zoom towns are leading the cool down.’”
“When Miriam Stocking listed her house for sale in March in the Boise-area, she was not inundated with multiple offers. Instead, she received one offer above the $725,000 asking price but the buyers soon backed out saying they’d decided they wanted an open-floor plan instead. By June she’d closed on a deal that was $25,000 below asking. ‘It’s a shift from the last years,’ says Shauna Pendleton, a real estate agent in Boise. ‘It was like, you put your house on the market and it’s 10 offers in 48 hours. A lot of sellers are almost resenting themselves that they did not sell sooner and missed the peak of the market.’”
“‘The home might have sold 60 days ago, but you can’t use the comp from 60 days ago because they were probably on the market 30 to 60 days prior to that,’ says Pendelton. ‘The pricing discussion is very, very brutal right now.’”
From KTVB on Idaho. “Today homebuyers are receiving loans with interest rates between 5 to 6%, said Boise Regional Realtor President Becky Enrico-Crum. A year ago, interest rates were closer to 3%. ‘It was like free money, everyone could buy a house,’ Enrico-Crum said. That led to a highly competitive market. It was normal for a home to receive offers from 11 different buyers, according to Enrico-Crum. To win the sale, buyers would volunteer to skip a home inspection or appraisal from a bank.”
“‘People were jokingly saying, ‘Can I put your kid through college? Then will you sell me your house?’ Enrico-Crum said. ‘Now the dust is starting to settle. Prices are starting to stabilize. I think it’s a good thing for buyers, because they have choice and don’t have to buy houses that are overvalued for the market. All of us are gonna have to mentally adjust to this is the new normal.’”
Bridge Michigan. “Broker Dan Elsea said the dip in showings among potential buyers — 40 percent of whom will list their homes on the market — portends an expected slowdown in the state’s long-heated housing market this fall as interest rates climb to around 6 percent, double what many people saw in 2021. ‘It’s a leading indicator,’ Elsea told Bridge Michigan of the drop in home showings. ‘When people stop looking at houses, that tells you something is going to happen. It’s hard for sellers to get to that come-down off that high we’ve had.’”
“Sales in rural communities are slowing. ‘My colleagues, I think, are talking about a little more grim situation, particularly in not such aggressive markets,’ Smith said. One example, Smith said, was a builder of a new home in the northeast Lower Peninsula who planned to list it soon for about $250,000 and worried about whether the time delay would eat into his profits as sales dropped in the region.”
The Post and Courier in South Carolina. “The home was on East North Street, which runs through a desirable and historic area just northeast of downtown Greenville, and in 24 hours it had over 20 showings and generated four offers from prospective buyers. In some instances, it seems, the home-buying frenzy that’s gripped the region for the past two years is still trying to hold on. Or, maybe not.”
“‘I would argue that had it been eight or 10 months ago, we probably would have had twice that many showings and 10 offers,’ said Robby Brady of Allen Tate Realtors, which listed the home. ‘So we are seeing a little slowdown. And if you get a little more rural or a little more unique, like a log cabin I have listed now, we’re up to three weeks whereas before even that would have sold in four to five days. So we are definitely normalizing.’”
“‘We’re telling people it’s a correction. You look at what Covid did to real estate, it went kind of crazy. People were buying homes off FaceTime without ever putting their foot on the hardwoods, and they were thrilled to death to get it with multiple offers within hours,’ said Jacob Mann, a top agent for Coldwell Banker Caine. ‘Some sellers are seeing some of those success stories and overshooting the price, and all of the sudden it’s on the market for two weeks. So it’s really now about product, location and price.’”
WFLA in Florida. “Earlier this year, houses were selling like hot cakes. ‘Five months ago, they had 15 offers in two hours,’ said Janice Lockridge Williams, a St. Pete Real Estate Consultant. Now, sellers are slashing prices as home sales decrease. ‘Prices are going down because of the fact that fewer people can afford to buy it.’”
Fox 26 in Texas. “Jeremy Paquette moved his family from Houston to Colorado over the summer while he waited to sell his westside home. ‘I figured, you know, somewhere in 35 to 40 days, there’d be a closing.’ Instead of the quick sale that he expected, the listing sat for weeks before finally getting an offer after trimming the asking price. ‘The looking was fast and furious. The offers: The first offer took a month to six weeks,’ he says. West Houston realtor Chris Hiller says a degree of sanity has returned to a frantic period of selling and buying. ‘I’d put the Fourth of July, almost as the day in my personal business, that the ship sailed,’ he says.”
The Greeley Tribune in Colorado. “‘Denver is now a neutral market. Prices are getting softer. We think it is headed to a buyer’s market,’ said Sean Black, CEO of Knock, a New York-based ‘Power Buyer’ that helps consumers make cash offers on homes. Nearly all of the 100 largest housing markets moved more in favor of buyers in July, with the biggest shifts coming in Boise, Idaho; Phoenix; Colorado Springs, and Austin, Texas, which has seen a 71% jump in home prices during the pandemic, according to Knock’s inaugural ‘Buyer-Seller Index.’”
“Three overheated and expensive California markets have now fully entered the buyer’s camp — San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose. By July 2023, about 15 of the 100 largest housing markets are projected to favor buyers. Of the top 10 metros most in favor of buyers come next summer, Colorado Springs is expected to rank third and Denver eighth, according to the index.”
“Steve Danyliw, a member of the DMAR Market Trends Committee, said the average sales to list price sellers received peaked at a very high 107% in April. By July it was 100.8%, evidence that competition was waning. ‘That concept of a lot of buyers paying over the asking price is over,’ Danyliw said. So too are the days where sellers refused to budge on requests from buyers. A separate survey of 449 sellers by Realtor.com found that nine in 10 sellers had accepted buyer-friendly terms and four in 10 accepted contract contingencies, a sign that buyers were gaining more power. No sellers had refused to make repairs requested by buyers.”
KFMB in California. “The real estate days are gone, where you once could offer $100,000 over the asking price, multiple offers, and two days on the market, according to real estate agents in San Diego. Meaning, homes with fantastic views are staying on the market 30 to 45 days which was typical pre pandemic. Panoramic views of San Diego Bay, Mt. Soledad, and the Pacific Ocean, yet a 2, plus bedroom, two bath, 2,500 square-foot smart home priced at $2.3 million in Bay Park has been sitting on the market since May.”
“‘The house is brand new, plumbing electrical kind of surprises me and the view,’ said Kim Alger, homeowner. ‘We are not really motivated. We love our home. We’re retired so it’s time to get out and travel and do things and see if we can sell it.’”
The Los Angeles Times in California. “If at first you don’t succeed, slash, slash the price. That’s Joel Silver’s strategy in Brentwood, where he just relisted his hot pink mega-mansion for $49 million — a 35% discount compared with his previous ask of $75 million.”
The New York Post. “The Manhattan townhouse where the French banker Olivier Sarkozy aimed to live in wedded bliss with Mary-Kate Olsen has sold after a year on the market — and more than a year after the couple finalized their divorce. Sarkozy parted ways with the gutted Turtle Bay property to the tune of $10.3 million. Sarkozy, via a limited liability company, bought the 38-foot-wide home for $13.5 million.”
From Global News. “Home prices are falling in many parts of Canada. ‘Before … it was a time when prices were skyrocketing, there were bidding wars and no conditions on offers,’ said Kelly Caldwell, a realtor based in Guelph, Ont. ‘People were just paying far, far too much for a property. So I think it’s much better in the sense that things have cooled off … at least in the one (market) I serve in, there’s a very strong buyer’s market.’”
INFOtel on Canada. “The heady days of March are far behind us in the real estate market. That’s when sale prices peaked following a fast and furious 2021 with ever increasing prices and shortages of supply. But such good times for sellers couldn’t last forever. ‘We knew our market was in trouble when we saw that the homes in parts of Springvalley and Rutland were priced the same as they were in Old Glenmore and the Mission,’ said Joe Ungaro, a real estate agent with Ungaro Albrecht Courtney and Associates/Royal LePage. ‘One of those sectors was out of alignment and sure enough, Rutland corrected faster. It normalized pretty quick.’”
“That kind of correction and the fact that the higher end of the market dropped off is one reason why the average price of single-family homes has been falling steadily in the Central Okanagan since the spring. But averages don’t tell the whole story of what’s happening in the local market. ‘What was really unusual through the pandemic was that we saw demand through the whole sector,’ Ungaro said. ‘We saw homes selling in all price categories at crazy rates. We’ve never seen that here before.’”
News.com.au in Australia. “A fed-up tiler has exposed every homebuyer’s nightmare, pointing out brand new but severely underdone city apartments. A video takes viewers on a tour of what he claims are ‘the worst units in Sydney.’ The problems don’t even start in the apartment with the video showing shoddy workmanship around the elevator and wonky doors in the hallway. The video shows a ‘finished’ bathroom with the shower left unsealed, and the tiles without grout. In a second bathroom, the tiler zooms in on the toilet buttons. The video shows a large, uneven gap between that and the tiles it is supposed to sit flush with.”
“‘Look at the workmanship – it’s just f**king garbage,’ he exclaimed. He then moved on to some rattly doors covered in uneven blotches of paint. ‘Everywhere you go, it’s like a kid done it,’ he said. ‘This is what you get these days in Sydney. They’re taking people’s money and building it s**t.’”
From Moneycontrol. “China’s biggest property developer Country Garden Holdings has reported a 96 percent drop in profits, blaming a ‘severe depression’ in the country’s realty sector in which ‘only the fittest can survive.’ The company’s problems have also seen its majority shareholder – Yang Huiyan, daughter of the founder – lose half her $24 billion fortune.”
From Politico. “‘House prices were elevated going into this monetary policy change, and this is a big interest rate shock we’re seeing,’ said Brian Coulton, chief economist at Fitch Ratings. ‘We’re heading into a monetary-tightening-driven slowdown, and housing is going to be affected by that more than the economy overall.’ No one’s really sure how bad it will get, Coulton said, as the Fed also reduces the portfolio of assets it bought to boost the market, in a bid to tackle inflation.”
“The central bank had pumped nearly $3 trillion into the mortgage market with the purchases of mortgage-backed securities in a process known as ‘quantitative easing.’ It’s now allowing those securities to mature and fall off its balance sheet, and it has left the door open to selling them as a way to shrink its portfolio more quickly. ‘Nobody knows how much real estate prices — not just in the U.S., but globally — were increased by quantitative easing,’ Coulton said. ‘But I think there’s a pretty strong consensus that QE did boost asset prices, and real estate prices in particular, and now we’re going into the opposite of that, and nobody has a particularly good model of what that will look like.’”