It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “Tiffany Todd remembers exactly when the housing market changed. Around May 15, Todd, a real estate agent for TD Realty in Mansfield, put a home on the market in Aubrey and noticed there were far fewer showings than another house she sold just weeks before. The house didn’t sell until early July at just under list price — something that was almost unheard of at the beginning of the year. ‘I had not seen that in years, and so that let me know we were really shifting,’ Todd said, adding that she then noticed other signs, such as homes taking weeks instead of days to get offers and sellers putting money toward buyers’ closing costs.”
“Now many sellers across North Texas are selling homes at or below list price, making price reductions, offering incentives to buyers and making contract compromises that would have been rare before the market cooled down. Matt Puckett decided to sell his McKinney home after he saw interest rates starting to affect demand, which he also saw in his job as an auto salesman. He listed the home for $550,000 on July 13 and sold for $515,000 after 32 days on the market and reducing the price. ‘We were seeing the market change, but we still expected this house to go very fast,’ said Andre Kocher of Keller Williams Dallas Metro North, who represented Puckett. ‘We thought it should have sold instantly, and it didn’t.’ Puckett bought a home in Princeton. ‘They’re building homes as fast as they can, and then what happens when the market slows down? They get stuck with a lot of homes,’ Puckett said.”
“Real estate agent Shay Stein remembers not too long ago when buyers pledged to name their firstborn after homeowners to get to the closing table. Now, buyers are increasingly asking for closing costs, repairs, or in some cases, insist on the availability of street parking or they’ll walk, Stein and other agents say. ‘Last year, they were making offers within two hours of the house being listed and now they’re visiting the home multiple times and asking for all kinds of things,’ says Stein, a Las Vegas real estate agent. ‘It’s like whiplash.’ It’s not uncommon for a buyer to be at an inspection and see that three new homes at better price points have popped up, Stein said.”
“Shauna Pendleton, a realtor in Boise, saw her client’s contract fall apart when the buyer insisted on getting a credit of $7,000 on the agreed-upon purchase price to do some repairs themselves. ‘The buyer walked away,’ she says. ‘Every single house that I’ve closed in the last few months have asked for inspections and there are anywhere from 10 to as much as like 20 items that the buyer wanted fixed. And they’re little things like teeny tiny little things that don’t affect living in the house.’”
“Suzi Dailey, a realtor based in Southern California said her clients, a couple with three kids who recently sold their $2 million home about to buy a bigger house at a similar price range. They were in escrow but backed out of a deal in August after an inspection revealed a neighbor’s shed and fence were 15-20 feet over on their would-be property. Dailey said her clients wanted the seller to get it taken care of either through an easement (permitted use of someone’s property) that would slightly reduce the selling price. ‘The seller refused to make any changes so my clients walked away. The seller was astonished,’ Dailey said.”
“In Greater Boston, there were fewer single-family homes sold in August than in any other August since 2011. Kymberly Terry of Milton, is looking for a new home for herself and her two daughters now that her parents are moving into assisted living and selling the house they all shared and she grew up in. She was looking to spend no more than $700,000 and was preapproved for a mortgage up to that price. Now, after the run-up in mortgage rates, she’s not sure just what she can afford — or what price her lender will approve.”
“‘Right now I am not feeling comfortable,’ Terry said. ‘I am seeing so many houses that had gone under agreement coming back on the market’ after bidders weren’t able to qualify for a loan, she said.”
“Rhode Island real estate agents share what you need to know: ‘People hirer us as advisers to sell their biggest asset, their house, but often, they don’t want to hear our advice,’ Sotheby’s International real estate agent Robert Rutley said. ‘A lot of times, I ask people, ‘What’s your expected price,’ and then I really show them the facts.’ While ‘aspirational pricing’ worked when mortgage rates were half what they are now, it no longer does. ‘I always say, if it’s not within 10% of the actual value, you’re not going to get offers and people will wait for price reductions, and we’re not seeing that expectation going into the future,’ Rutley said.”
“Fewer homes were sold in Whatcom County in the third quarter of 2022 than in the same period in 2021. The median price of homes sold in Whatcom County in the third quarter was $599,000, which was 7.7% higher than the same time last year but 7.7% lower than the second quarter of 2022. ‘Values have been increasing at an unsustainable rate for years and so I think the market softening a bit, kind of finding an equilibrium, is really where we’re at,’ said Troy Muljat of Bellingham-based Muljat Group Realtors. ‘Prices have decreased quarter over quarter.’”
“Bidding war rates have been falling for seven straight months now, and that means sellers are facing a new reality. Redfin listing agent Sam Chute of Miami says: ‘The worst thing a seller can do right now is price their home too high, and the best thing they can do is price just below market value to catch buyers’ interest. Buyers aren’t going to pay extreme amounts of money or waive contingencies like they did last year, but they will pay a fair price for a nice home.’”
“In early 2020, Celeste Strong decided to sell their home in Phoenix. ‘I was on the verge of bankruptcy,’ she said. She found Opendoor, the Tempe-based online real estate company did an inspection and made her an offer. She believes she was shortchanged at least $20,000. ‘I was getting screwed,’ she said. ‘They knew the position I was in. When all was said and done, I didn’t have the capability of stopping the process and trying to go a different way. They’ll say that I did. In the documents, you can cancel anytime up to closing, but then what would I do? I already got a house. I couldn’t do rent and a mortgage. Really, I was stuck.’ Strong’s story is familiar. The Federal Trade Commission and Opendoor reached a $62 million settlement to resolve a slew of allegations.”
“The housing slowdown is raising new questions about the future of iBuyers. ‘They were buying houses like crazy in the first half of the year,’ says Stefan Peterson, co-founder of Zavvie, a real estate technology company. ‘Then in July, they really put the brakes on. They’re just not making a lot of offers. The market’s risky right now. It’s unpredictable, and they’re responding in an appropriate way.’”
“Home sales plummeted in the region of Canada’s largest city last month, down 44 per cent from last September at a time when the typically busy fall real estate season is usually getting started. That downward trend was repeated in other major cities, with September sales dropping 46 per cent year-over-year and 10 per cent from August in the greater Vancouver region. In Montreal, September home sales dropped to their lowest level since 2013. Cailey Heaps, president of the Heaps Estrin Real Estate Team in Toronto still sees some sellers pricing their homes as if it were months ago, when the market was roaring. ‘But those people who are realistic about pricing and sort of forget the first five months of 2022 and price to today’s market, in the central core of Toronto, those properties are selling,’ she said.”
“Mail carrier Luc Roy spends a lot of time on the streets of Moncton, N.B. When he started his career two years ago ‘for sale’ signs were seemingly on every other line, but now he’s noticing something different when he walks his route. ‘I have seen a decrease, especially from when I first started, the market was booming,’ Roy says. ‘There was a lot of houses for sale everywhere.’ ‘It felt like almost the tap just kind of shut off as far as the momentum of what we had previously,’ says real estate agent Danielle Johnson.”
“It’s the same story in Halifax. ‘We’ve grown the inventory from about 250 listings to about 750 in Halifax, but then it has just stayed steady for about the last eight weeks or so,’ says Matt Honsberger, the president of Royal Lepage Atlantic. That has caused prices to level off too. Honsberger says the average price for a home and Halifax has dropped from the mid $500,000 range to the low $500,000s or high $400,000s. ‘We certainly saw the peak at around March of this year, where you would’ve seen the highest average price that we have ever seen in Halifax specifically, and it has come back to early year levels, late 2021 levels,’ Honsberger says.”
“Halifax’s Kim Kinnaird said that while economic uncertainty had stalked the market in the past few weeks, the reality was that average house prices had been largely flat since June. ‘This compares to a rise of more than £10,000 during the previous quarter, suggesting the housing market may have already entered a more sustained period of slower growth,’ he said. Jonathan Hopper, of the real estate consultant Garrington Property Finders, warned that the data marked the beginning of a steeper correction across the market. ‘What began imperceptibly is now unmistakable,’ he said. ‘The heat has gone out of the market and a period of price rationalisation has begun.’”
“The slide in Swedish home prices deepened in September amid signs the housing market was drying up. The Nordic nation, with one of the world’s hottest property markets during the pandemic, is now facing a double-digit decline similar to peers such as Australia and Canada. The drop in prices for detached houses has been more pronounced in Sweden’s three biggest cities of Stockholm, Malmo and Gothenburg, with declines of 6-9% from a year earlier.”
“The booming property prices in Queensland’s two biggest regional centres are clearly cooling, with values now falling faster than almost anywhere else in the state. Matt Diesel heads the Real Estate Institute of Queensland on the Sunshine Coast and says while people ‘aren’t enjoying’ watching property prices fall, the change should not come as a surprise. ‘We’ve gone from a nuts market back to a normal market,’ he said.”
“A missed debt payment by the developer of Legoland Korea theme park adds to difficulties faced by the nation’s real estate market already weakened by surging interest rates. The amusement park opened in May just as turmoil in global debt markets made it much pricier for Korean borrowers including developers to refinance debt. ‘There are already increased concerns over real estate project financing debt and lower-rated builders in Korea, and this event will likely further dent investor sentiment toward those sectors, raising their refinancing risks,’ said Kim Eun-gie, credit analyst in Seoul at Samsung Securities Co. ‘It’s like slapping someone who is about to cry.’”