It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “Lee Roberts, 74, the retired CEO of Fort Worth-based RadioShack, has put his five-bedroom, 10-bathroom home at 4400 Overton Crest St. up for auction. Roberts and his wife invested $12 million in the property. ‘Somebody’s gonna make millions of dollars at this auction, and it won’t be us,’ Roberts said. ‘We don’t expect a return on investment, but that’s fine.’”
“Austin’s housing market is ‘trending in the right direction,’ the president of the Austin Board of Realtors said Thursday. ‘Buyers have more options and negotiating power with each passing month, and sellers have more time to make their next move,’ ABoR President Ashley Jackson said. ‘Remember, a healthy housing market isn’t defined by breaking records every month, but by market activity that’s steady-paced and sustainable.’ Median home prices dropped by 12% year-over-year to a metro average of $436,419. There was considerable variation among counties in the metro though. Median prices in Hays County dropped to their lowest in 17 months, while prices in Williamson County dropped to 23-month lows. As of February, 7,167 homes are currently listed on the market, a 499% increase since last February.”
“The days of mega-mega-million home sales may be coming to an end, at least in Los Angeles. Several seven- or eight-figure properties in the city have seen their prices slashed. A massive Bel-Air estate was listed for $100 million in 2018. Last month, it was relisted for a much cheaper—although still expensive—$59 million, a 41 percent drop. A five-acre Beverly Hills home asked $135 million in 2018, but its price has been cut 12 percent. ‘No buyer at this juncture wants to feel they’re paying 2021 or 2020 prices,’ Beverly Hills Estates’ Rayni Williams told the WSJ.”
“Three Bay Area cities are actually among the top five U.S. metro areas that saw the biggest drop in year-over-year median home sale prices last week, according to Redfin. Out of 24 of the 50 most populous U.S. metro areas where median sales prices fell, San Jose was tops of the list with a -17.2% YoY decline. Coming in at number three was San Francisco with an -11% YoY decline. Oakland was fourth with -10.9 YoY decline. Rounding out the top five were Austin at number two, -13%, and Sacramento in fifth, -8.6%.”
“The Carson City housing market is seeing a small spring bounce by some measures, according to Sierra Nevada Realtors. For the combined six counties, the median price of an existing single-family home was $480,000 in February, down only 5.9 percent from the previous year. The median sales price for an existing single-family residence in Washoe County was $515,000 in February, an increase of 1 percent from the previous month and a 7.5 percent drop from last year. Churchill County saw a small dip in the median price. In February, the median sales price there for an existing home was $332,500, a 1.8 percent decrease from January and a 6.3 percent decrease from the previous year. The median sales price for an existing house in Douglas County also dipped to $566,250, representing a 9.4 drop from January and a smaller 5.6 percent decrease from the previous year.”
“The City of Melbourne Florida is cracking down on nuisance properties as neighbors plead for change. Homeowners living near 4445 Sherwood Boulevard take pride in their properties but said they are fed up living next to a home they say has only been a nightmare. ‘What the kids call the zombie house,’ said Matthew More, who just bought a home in the neighborhood in January. Since then, he’s been shocked at the constant issues stemming from one home. ‘We’ve taken a proactive approach in the city to file lawsuits on these properties to force the foreclosures and to get this property turned over,’ exclaimed City of Melbourne Mayor Paul Alfrey.”
“Even before regulators seized Signature Bank, shaking regional lending markets, rent-stabilized building owners were worried. Not about Signature, though. About their buildings’ finances. In fact, they were counting on Signature to help. Valentina Gojcaj, who manages a mostly rent-stabilized, 700-unit portfolio, recently tried to refinance a loan on an eight-unit building, only to find national lenders wouldn’t touch it. ‘The property is basically underwater,’ Gojcaj said, pointing to the rent law and Covid arrears squeezing the building’s revenue while inflation bloated its operating costs. ‘[The bigger banks], they didn’t want anything to do with the property,’ Gojcaj said. ‘We finally found a regional bank that, with personal guarantees, allowed us to pull a loan out.’ She is one of many owners of the city’s 900,000 rent-stabilized units struggling to pay their debts. Signature was a major lender on those properties.”
“‘What we are afraid of is a snowball effect,’ Gaia Real Estate’s Danny Fishman told The Real Deal Monday after a weekend spent yanking funds from regional institutions. ‘As soon as rumors start, there’s a run on the bank,’ he said. ‘And no bank can survive a run.’”
“The full picture of why Silicon Valley Bank failed so spectacularly and so fast has not yet come into focus. But uncommon lending practices at the cutting-edge lender contributed to its woes. Of the roughly $74 billion in total loans Silicon Valley Bank held on its books at year-end, almost half — $34 billion — went to borrowers who used the money to buy or carry securities of their own, regulatory data shows. ‘Typically, if you looked at a bank with a $74 billion loan book, other banks would be interested in buying that,’ said Bill Moreland, chief executive of BankRegData, a provider of bank regulatory statistics and analysis. ‘But when 46% of your loan book is to purchase and carry securities, a lot of banks would have to ask themselves ‘What is the value of those loans?’ ‘Is that an attractive asset?’”
“Speaking following layoffs at Google owner Alphabet (12,000) and Meta (11,000 in November and a further 10,000 this month), Insider reported Silicon Valley VC Keith Rabois saying, ‘There’s nothing for these people to do—it’s all fake work. Now that’s being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings.’ Former Meta employee Brit Levy has taken to TikTok to share her ‘weird’ experience in Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant. ‘The participants of the program got placed on different teams throughout Meta,’ she explained. ‘The people on those teams were full-time employees who had been with Meta for years—and those people weren’t doing anything. I had all the time in the world to just message random people: engineers, program managers, project managers. I messaged them and had a 15- to 20-minute conversation about what they did all day and they would tell me they weren’t working on anything either.’”
“Someone lives in a swanky downtown Toronto penthouse, drives a status-symbol car, but in a case of truly living beyond one’s means, doesn’t pay their monthly rent. Housing policy expert and rent recovery specialist Varun Sriskanda explains that the landlord wants to evict the tenant for non-payment of rent, as the landlord claims the monthly fee of $5,000 has not been paid for over ten months. After roughly a year of non-payment, Sriskanda says the owner is suffering ‘serious financial loss,’ and that ‘the cost of carrying the condo is crushing him with debt.’ Even if you’re not one to sympathize with landlords in this inflated housing market, non-payment of rent is a tough one to justify, especially if the tenant in question drives a freakin’ Lamborghini.”
“Between 2020 and 2021, house prices in Portugal shot up by 157%. From 2015 to 2021, rents jumped by 112%, according the European Union’s statistics agency Eurostat. In Portugal, the problem has been magnified by tourism. Rosa Santos, a 59-year-old born and raised close to Lisbon’s 14th-century St. George’s Castle, says most homes in her neighborhood are occupied by short-term vacation rentals, largely for foreign tourists. The locals’ rich traditions are gone, and there’s not even a bakery or grocery store there now, Santos says. ‘It’s not a neighborhood anymore,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a city, it’s an amusement park.’”
“Hugo Ferreira Santos of the Portuguese Association of Real Estate Developers and Investors said foreign investment has ground to a halt as people wait to see how the golden visa changes shape up. Small-time investors in apartments for short-term vacation rentals also are aggrieved. ‘There are people that left their lives, set up their own businesses, generated jobs, have workers and suddenly one day they are knocked down without any prospect,’ said Eduardo Miranda, head of a Portuguese association representing their interests.”
“The property market in Australia has faced the largest annual decline on record. CoreLogic Australia on Thursday revealed house prices had dropped 7.9 per cent over the year to February, the largest 12-month decline ever recorded. Sydney copped the largest decline in value, down 13.4 per cent over the year, while Melbourne tumbled 9.6 per cent. Across the country Hobart tumbled 11.8 per cent, Brisbane dropped 6.8 per cent, Canberra fell 6.7 per cent, Adelaide dived 5.1 per cent, Darwin dipped 2.9 per cent, while Perth had the smallest margin, down just 2.4 per cent.”
“China’s home prices gained momentum nationally in February, rising for a second consecutive month driven by pent-up demand even in smaller cities, but prices have yet to recoup all their losses and there remains a sizable stock of unsold homes. Official data on Wednesday showed the area of unsold homes stood at 655 million square meters as of the end of February.”
“I felt a familiar pang of anxiety as I read the news: Here we go again. Financial crises often occur due to a bursting bubble. In 2008, it was the housing bubble. Recently, the crypto bubble burst, causing losses of billions of dollars. And now, the high-tech bubble may be on the verge of exploding. A bubble is simply another way of saying, ‘everyone has it, so I want it too.’ The price keeps rising as everyone rushes to grab a piece of the pie. Until … poof! It’s all gone.”