A report from the Sacramento Bee in California. “The Sacramento region’s housing affordability crisis has eased. Very, very slightly. Placer, El Dorado and Yolo counties also saw affordability numbers increase slightly. Median prices have been steadily falling in recent weeks. Sacramento appraiser and real estate market analyst Ryan Lundquist reported last week that the median price in the region “is officially below last year.” According to Lundquist’s analysis, ‘40% of pandemic price gains have been wiped away over the past six months.’”
From Money.com. “Redfin’s experts attribute the spike in delistings to a sharp drop in demand. ‘Some sellers are having a hard time grasping that we’re not in a housing-market frenzy anymore — it’s tough for them to swallow that they missed the boat on getting a high price,’ said Jacksonville, Florida, Redfin agent Heather Kruayai.”
The Seattle Times in Washington. “The three-bedroom home on a cul-de-sac in Kirkland hit the market in September at nearly $1.1 million. A few weeks later, the sellers dropped the price, then dropped it again — and again. In early December, the home was still for sale, an illustration of the region’s cooling housing market. ‘Just several months ago, that would have been off the market in five days,’ said Jen Cameron, the listing agent.”
“It’s not just this one house in Kirkland. Home sales have slowed and prices have plateaued all over the Seattle area, particularly on the Eastside, where the pandemic-fueled housing frenzy once pushed prices up 30% in a year. After that kind of runaway growth, ‘the correction was inevitable,’ said Windermere broker Max Rombakh, who less than a year ago sold a home in Bellevue for nearly $1 million over its asking price. ‘At some point, it had to slow down.’”
“Jennifer German, the seller of the Kirkland home, watched a similar house down the street sell this spring for $1.6 million, $325,000 above its asking price. By the time she and her husband listed for $1.095 million in hopes of moving to Palm Springs, California, ‘we thought we were pretty competitively priced, back down to pre-COVID prices in the neighborhood,’ she said. Potential buyers passed through open houses, but the house sat unsold. One offer fell through.”
“‘The market has changed so quickly up here,’ German said. ‘It seemed like things were selling in three days and then just all of a sudden, they just stopped.’ A notable dip is taking place east of Lake Washington. At this time last year, Eastside home prices were up nearly 35% from the year before. This year, they’re down nearly 8%.”
The Mountaineer in North Carolina. “The housing market continued to slow in Haywood County in October compared to last year’s unprecedented home sales. The average sale price was $356,000 compared to $376,000 last October. The median sale price fell to $305,500, a 5% decline from $323,000 last October. Sellers are fetching less compared to their asking price as the control sellers had over the market continues to slip. Sale prices compared to listing prices dipped 2%, with sellers getting 93.4% of their listing price. Haywood was not alone in the trends. The greater Asheville region — including Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson and Madison counties — saw a similar decline in home sales and new listings.”
WESA in Pennsylvania. “More people have returned to Downtown Pittsburgh for work, but the number of employees reporting to offices in the Golden Triangle each day remains far below pre-pandemic levels. While there’s still a market for top-tier office space, working from home is ‘reducing the pool of tenants that are looking for lower-tier space and maybe less desirable locations,’ said Jessica Morin, who leads U.S. research for real estate firm CBRE. ‘That’s going to really increase that supply of undesirable office [space].’ That’s left a lot of empty rooms Downtown – more than 11 million square feet of it as of this time last year, according to the Urban Redevelopment Authority. That’s still as if 95 football fields were stacked into buildings all over the Central Business District, with nobody on them.”
“In July, city, county, and state officials announced a $9 million pilot to convert Downtown office spaces into homes. There’s an oversupply of offices and a need for housing, ‘so it seems like a perfect solution to start converting’ the former into the latter, said Morin. ‘However, conversions are challenging.’”
Axios on Arizona. “Home values dropped across the Valley from July to October as the red hot housing market continues to cool, according to Zillow. We’ve put the stats into an interactive map. Typical home prices, based on the Zillow Home Value Index fell most sharply on the west side, particularly around Glendale, west Phoenix and Tolleson. The two biggest decreases, both of 8.2%, were in neighboring ZIP codes — 85031 and 85035. The drops reduced the typical home price from $297,000 to $273,000 in 85031 and from $290,000 to $266,000 in 85035.”
“Tolleson, the western part of Phoenix’s Estrella Village area and Glendale between 67th and 83rd avenues notched 7.5% decreases. No part of the Valley has been spared. Every ZIP code in the Phoenix metro area experienced price decreases during this period. The smallest decreases we saw were in the Apache Junction and Gold Canyon area, where prices only dropped by 2.2%. The 85006 ZIP code only saw a 2.5% drop, from about $443,000 to $432,000. Phoenix Realtors president Andrea Crouch tells Axios that the decrease in values and prices was a change that needed to happen. ‘It is a result of sellers coming down from the moon on where they wanted their price to be, down to the Earth where the buyers are,’ she said.”
From Reuters. “Home prices in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) fell in November. The average price of a GTA home fell to C$1.08 million ($794,527) in November, down 1% from October and down 7.2% from a year ago. Prices were about 19% below February’s peak. Sales nearly halved from a year ago. ‘Increased borrowing costs represent a short-term shock to the housing market,’ TRREB President Kevin Crigger said in a statement.”
The Globe and Mail in Canada. “Home inspections are making a comeback as buyers take advantage of a slow real estate market to make sure their dream home isn’t a disaster in disguise. Nasma Ali, founder of One Group Toronto Real Estate, says the vast majority of buyers she works with are including inspection conditions to take advantage of the slow market, which has been sluggish in the face of multiple interest-rate hikes. ‘Buyers have this mentality that they’re doing you a favour by giving you this offer, so they’re going to include every possible condition,’ said Ms. Ali. ‘It’s a buyer’s market, there’s no doubt about it.’”
The Helsinki Times. “House prices in Finland will stay on a downward path in 2023, forecasts Nordea. The Helsinki-based financial services group reported last week that it expects house prices to fall by an average of five per cent next year. The fall could be even steeper in the capital region because of an oversupply of small houses and bigger housing loans and interest costs compared to other parts of the country. Nordea pointed especially to the slowdown witnessed in October. The Federation of Real Estate Agency, it noted, has reported that the number of property sales fell 23 per cent short of the monthly average from the past decades.”
From CNBC. “The German housing market has been remarkably strong for decades, but it faces a serious fall in prices over the next couple of years, according to some analysts. House prices have already declined around 5% since March, according to Deutsche Bank data, and they will drop between 20% and 25% in total from peak to trough, forecasts Jochen Moebert, a macroeconomic analyst at the German lender. The Association of German Pfandbrief Banks (VDP) anticipates we have already seen the peak in Germany property prices ‘for the time being’ but the fundamentals of the market are still working well, according to VDP CEO Jens Tolckmitt.”
“The scarcity of housing, increasing rental prices and a strong labor market will continue to support the market, Tolckmitt said, and even if house prices dropped, it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. ‘If house prices reduced by 20%, which we do not expect at the moment, then we would be on the price level of 2020. Is this a problem? Maybe not,’ Tolckmitt said.”
News Talk New Zealand. “House prices have fallen by an average of $90,000 in parts of New Zealand. That meant homeowners who bought at the height of the property boom in late 2021 could find themselves with mortgages larger than the value of their home, especially in Auckland and Wellington. The housing market went from ‘fear of missing out’ to ‘fear of overpaying,’ Oneroof editor Owen Vaughan said, as a boom which started during Covid gave way to falling prices, tighter lending and uncertainty about the year ahead.”
“The average property value fell 17.7 per cent ($201,818) in the Greater Wellington region since prices peaked in March, with some central suburbs taking a price hit of more than $400,000. This was largely because of the withdrawal of Auckland investors who had driven much of the inflation since the Covid-19 pandemic. In Auckland, average property values fell 12 per cent (more than $180,000) since the peak.”
“‘Inflation is the elephant in the room and won’t disappear overnight. But while cost of living pressures are reaching across nearly all parts of our daily lives, we’re actually not seeing a significant drop in spending and that’s probably because a lot of people still haven’t had to fix their mortgage at a higher rate,’ said James Wilson, head of valuations at Valocity. ‘When that happens and those mortgage rates begin to really bite, then spending is likely to dry up. Obviously, that has bigger economic impacts but the key question is: will inflation be tamed by traditional policy or will a hard, economic landing do the job? At this point, a lot of signs point to a harder landing than would be ideal.’”
The South China Morning Post. “Homeowners in Hong Kong looking to sell have missed the window for striking a favourable deal, analysts said, as they expect propery prices to continue to slump after touching the lowest level in five years. The Centa-City Leading Index, which has already lost 16.8 per cent since the peak in August 2021, is expected to decline further to nearly 25 per cent by late January. The decline for some estates has exceeded that level, with Telford Gardens in Kowloon Bay witnessing a slump of 30 per cent.”
“‘The decline in home prices has not stopped,’ said Wong Leung-sing, senior associate director of research at Centaline. ‘If there is no good news in the market that can cause fluctuations, the CCL will test the 144 level around Chinese New Year.’”
“Many homeowners who are about to emigrate and in a rush to sell are also willing to accept lower prices. At Heng Fa Chuen, a homeowner about to leave the city sold a 658 sq ft flat for HK$8.93 million in mid-November, HK$1.8 million, or 17 per cent, less than the price paid three years ago, according to Centaline. Agents desperate to attract potential homebuyers’ eyeballs and drum up sales are resorting to creative catchphrases to promote listings in the streets and branches. These usually feature reasons for heavy price cuts, such as emigration and stock market losses.”
From Reuters. “‘I’m nearly bankrupt,’ says Jad Fawaz, a crypto trader in Abu Dhabi. ‘I’m laughing because there’s no point in exerting more depression and more frustration about it.’ The 45-year-old, who quit his real-estate job a year ago to focus on trading, has seen his holdings evaporate in recent months. He hasn’t slept in a week because of the stress. ‘I had about 40 coins and then I came down to 20 coins then I came down to 10 coins, came down to five coins and now I’m down to the last two coins, and it’s bitcoin and ripple XRP,’ he says. ‘So these are the last two coins and I will die before selling them.’”
“‘This is not the winter season anymore, this is a bloodbath, because the FTX crisis was like a domino that toppled so many companies,’ said Linda Obi, a crypto investor in the Nigerian city of Lagos who works at blockchain firm Zenith Chain.The 38-year-old said she was a ‘long-haul’ investor with an investment horizon of five years and traded ‘a bit of everything,’ including altcoins and memecoins. ‘I’m gonna be very honest, I do think there’s a whole lot of hype around crypto, with influencer marketing and your favorite celebrities talking about crypto,’ she added.”