A report from WRLN. “Their billboards used to plaster South Florida. Their contractors went door-to-door, offering expensive and much-needed upgrades to roofs, windows and air conditioning units — with no money down, no credit check needed. Ygrene Energy was the biggest player in a novel and controversial industry that bankrolls home improvements and gets paid back by charges added to a homeowner’s tax bill. But late last year, Ygrene, the state’s most high-profile green energy finance company, suddenly vanished from the Florida market — a move that left contractors in the middle of projects unpaid and homeowners scrambling to pay big unexpected bills.”
“For Ray and Kelly Coulter, the company’s abrupt withdrawal came weeks after their brand-new roof and impact windows were installed on their West Palm Beach home. ‘We were sold a bill of goods that’s no longer there,’ said Ray, a 53-year-old facilities manager. Jonathan Akl, a St. Lucie-based contractor, said he had 60 projects affected under his former employer, leaving some homeowners with unfinished roofs while the financial details were worked out. ‘We had 60 open files with the company. They reneged on every single one of them,’ he said. ‘Literally at midnight they dropped all contracts that weren’t closed. A lot of people got screwed.’”
Bisnow New York. “New York City’s condo market is facing a lull as fewer new units hit the market and sellers of existing units, disappointed with the offers they are receiving, are pulling their listings from the market in large numbers. Sellers delisted as many as 5,300 units in the second half of 2022, Vickey Barron, a real estate agent at Compass, told Bisnow. ‘People have pulled their listings off the market,’ she said. ‘It’s because they’re feeling defeated there. It’s not selling.’”
From Hawaii Business. “It seems like a paradox: More Hawaiʻi homeowners were equity rich at the end of last year, but also an increasing number of homeowners in the Islands – particularly on Oʻahu – were seriously underwater on their mortgages, according to a new report. Oʻahu is just starting to see prices decrease after years of steady increases. The Honolulu Board of Realtors reported the median price of a single-family home in January declined to $970,000 from $1.05 million in January 2021, a decline of 7.6%.”
“For any homeowner who bought in the past few years and is worried about prices going down now, Chad Takesue, chief operating officer of Honolulu real estate firm Locations, says to look at the long-term appreciation: In the last five years, Oʻahu condos had an average of 24% appreciation while single-family homes appreciated 45%. ‘You only make money and lose money when you sell,’ he says.”
The Las Vegas Business Press. “Local home prices continue to decline, with more homes available for sale and fewer being sold than one year earlier. So says a recent Las Vegas Realtors report. LVR reported the median price of existing single-family homes sold in Southern Nevada through its Multiple Listing Service during January was $425,000. That’s the same price as December, and down 2.3 percent from $435,000 in January 2022. It’s also down from the all-time record price of $482,000 in May 2022.”
“By the end of January 2023, LVR reported 5,450 single-family homes listed for sale without any sort of offer. That’s up 199.3 percent from the same time last year. Likewise, the 1,233 condos and townhomes listed without offers in January represent a 282.9 percent jump from one year earlier.”
The Orange County Register in California. “People priced out of the California housing market often approach land real estate agent Danielle Davenport with their Plan B. If they can’t afford an existing house, they’ll buy a piece of land and build, they tell her. But Davenport, a Bay Area-based land director for Keller Williams California, cautions buyers about investing in vacant parcels as an alternative to housing. ‘We go through exhaustive training because buying land is a huge liability,’ Davenport said. ‘Major builders have pulled out of purchasing right now and are working on entitlements.’”
The Colorado Sun. “For the first time in recent memory, the median price of a house in metro Denver is less than it was a year ago. And for some who make a living selling houses, there’s a sense of relief. ‘Every single month in 2021 and the first half of 2022, everybody in our (real estate) community went, ‘Oh my goodness. How much more can this go? What will buyers put up with?’ I mean having to pay a penny over the appraised value is just bonkers to me,’ said Matt Leprino, CEO of Denver-based real estate brokerage Remingo. Metro Denver’s median sales price hit a high of $660,000 in April, up 17.4% in a year. That dropped to $569,804, as of January, which is 1.4% lower than a year-ago January. Mesa County saw a 3.4% dip in its median-sales price, falling to $379,950 in January.”
From Bloomberg. “Retired baseball star Alex Rodriguez took to LinkedIn in late 2021 to ask for help: He’d invested alongside Starwood Capital Group in a single-family rental company that was buying 1,000 homes a month and needed to hire as many as 500 people to keep up. ‘The right time to get on board is now,’ he wrote in a post. More than a year later, the company, Tiber Capital Group, is pulling back, the victim of a sudden housing slowdown that caught many sophisticated players by surprise. The Capitol Heights, Maryland-based firm has sharply curtailed real estate purchases and fired hundreds of workers, according to people familiar with the business.”
“The rapid growth of companies such as Tiber has been one of the defining features of the US housing landscape in recent years, adding to a homebuying frenzy that peaked with the largest single-family landlords buying more than 10,000 homes a month. Now, Tiber and its peers have become symbols of a dizzying retrenchment — cutting jobs and slamming the brakes on buying while they wait for the market to improve. The slowdown in buying has persisted. The 20 largest single-family rental firms, which bought more than 10,000 homes in September 2021, acquired about 850 properties in December 2022, according to data firm SFR Analytics.”
The Globe and Mail in Canada. “Real estate agent Raymond Chin recently had the daunting task of helping a couple with three small children quickly sell their existing four-bedroom house in suburban Ottawa after the couple purchased a larger house. The couple purchased the detached, four-bedroom house at 526 Antique Court for the full asking price of $1.1-million, and also agreed to the sellers’ request for a June closing – seven months away. But the pair then faced selling their existing detached, four-bedroom home in the depths of the Ottawa winter.”
“Mr. Chin was confident the house in the Half Moon Bay area would sell but the couple needed to fetch a strong price in order to be able to move up to the next property. ‘It was stressful. We had to sell this home,’ he says. ‘The longer it sits on market, the less we get on price.’ To add to the challenge, Mr. Chin says, there were 15 other houses in the neighbourhood on the market at the same time – most at lower prices. The sellers fretted about the low bid and wondered if they should wait until the weekend open house. But the buyers were willing to negotiate, and the two sides eventually struck a deal for 922,000. ‘We’ll see more desperate sellers,’ Mr. Chin says. ‘People should have known [low rates] wouldn’t last forever but no one expected such a rapid increase.’”
“Shawn Lackie of Coldwell Banker R.M.R. says the average sale price in Durham has dropped approximately $342,000 to $886,000 from $1.228-million at the peak in February, 2022. Many buyers are assuming that rates will come down by 2025 or so, he says. They figure that puts them in a better position than people who purchased at the peak. ‘If you’re paying $1-million for a house that you should have only paid $750,000 for, the price of the house is forever,’ he points out.”
“A modest bungalow in Durham, for example, might be listed with an asking price of $699,000 and sell for $725,000 or $750,000 or so instead of a price above $900,000. Mr. Lackie says some buyers who got caught up in ‘fear of missing out’ during the pandemic run-up are now feeling remorse.”
ABC Business in Australia. “In a case of what goes up must come down, property prices in Byron Bay have plunged 25 per cent in the past 12 months as interest rate hikes start to bite and tree and sea changers move back to the city. After experiencing staggering price growth during COVID, the New South Wales Richmond-Tweed area, which takes in Byron, is now the worst performing regional market according to CoreLogic data, with house values falling by an average of 18.6 per cent.”
“CoreLogic head of research Eliza Owen said property prices barely grew in those parts of SA before COVID emboldened people to move away from capital cities such as Adelaide. Ms Owen described this as a price adjustment, off the back of interest rate rises, after ‘exorbitant’ growth during COVID. ‘This was the region where values skyrocketed, with houses increasing more than 50% during COVID, taking the median house value to more than $1.1 million,’ she said. ‘Since then much has changed with borders reopening, outbound travel returning, workers returning to the office not to mention the overlay of nine rate rises. It’s been a swift and significant shift.’”
“She cautioned 2023 would be an ‘interesting test’ for the property market with buyers’ borrowing capacity falling dramatically and many homeowners on fixed term mortgages yet to feel the impact of consecutive interest rate hikes. ‘This is going to really rock the market, whether it is regional capital, city values, it’s going to have an impact,’ she said.”