A report from the Naples Daily News. “A luxury home in the sought-after Moorings community will be sold to the highest bidder. Minutes from downtown Naples, the nearly 5,000-square-foot home is described as the ‘very epitome of fine Southwest Florida living.’ Neither the property, nor the sellers are ‘distressed,’ rather the auction is designed to drum up more interest in a cooling market, with more homes up for sale and competing for attention, said Randy Haddaway, CEO of Elite Auctions. ‘It’s a well-maintained property, no distress, whatsoever,’ Haddaway said. ‘The sellers, they are just ready to move on. It will sell on auction day to the highest bidder, regardless of price.’ The home’s current listing price is $5,998,000. The home hit the market in January for $6.5 million. It has been on and off the market since then, with several price adjustments made along the way, according to Realtor.com. Property records show it last sold for $6.4 million in July 2022.”
The Coeur d’Alene Press in Idaho. “Kootenai County’s single-family dwellings, which are classified as being on less than 2 acres, went for a median sales price of $538,000 in May 2023. Now, one year later, that median sales price has remained flat. New construction in Kootenai County went from $551,000 to $540,000, said Windermere Coeur d’Alene Realty co-owner Jennifer Smock. ‘That does not mean the price of new construction is going down,’ she said. Larger parcels of 10-plus acres that went for $449,000 this time last year have been reduced to $424,000, she said. ‘The consumer has finally reached this limit,’ Smock said. ‘We all have reached this point, the paying point, where we’re like, ‘No, we’re just not going to pay that anymore for that.’ We’re seeing a lot of offers come in considerably lower and tons of price reductions on land.’”
“From 2023 to 2024, Idaho had the lowest percentage of year-over-year home appreciation. Smock said this was not a surprise. ‘Our values went up huge,’ she said. ‘It makes sense that there’s going to be pushback with the interest rates, they’re going to come back down, we’re not seeing the appreciation because we already enjoyed that appreciation two to three years ago.’”
Hawaii News Now. “Home ownership is a dream for many people. But experts and the federal government say you shouldn’t be spending more than 30% or your income to buy a home. In urban Honolulu, it costs way more than that, according to the National Association of Homebuilders and Wells Fargo. Based on Honolulu’s median home price of $1,085,800 and median family income of $120,100, the index said a mortgage requires 73% of the median paycheck. The same home would cost 147% of a low-income paycheck, based on half the median income.State Sen. Stanley Chang, who chairs the senate Housing Committee, acknowledges that things have changed since his father was a homeowner. ‘Now for me to buy that home that he bought in 1983 with one state salary would take over 40 years of my entire state salary,’ he said.”
From WKMS. “Tennessee counties are lowering their property taxes as housing values climbed to new highs over the past four years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean smaller tax bills for homeowners. Jim Lance, a homeowner in Jefferson County, told the Lookout his three-bedroom, four-bathroom house, which he bought in 2018 for around $578,000, increased in value to nearly $927,000 during this year’s reappraisal period. Most of Lance’s neighbors on Byrd Spring Ranch have seen similar increases. ‘We bought this house when we retired on a fixed income, and if our taxes go up, it will make it harder to afford,’ Lance said. ‘It seems like the way property values and taxes are going we’re going to be priced out.’”
Bisnow New York. “Despite nearly $3.5B in rental assistance being doled out in the last four years and an economy that has more than recovered all of the lost jobs from the pandemic, tenants in New York City’s affordable housing units are still not paying their rent at nearly the same levels as they once did. Landlords of subsidized housing are owed more than $100M in unpaid rent, according to a recent study. When adding in the rising cost of insurance, maintenance costs and labor, owners and operators of the most-needed residential properties say the rent shortfall is likely to cause the housing crisis to worsen if not addressed quickly. Speaking at the affordable housing conference, BRP Cos. Managing Director Andrew Cohen said there is ‘a culture of nonpayment’ among tenants who don’t want to pay.”
The San Francisco Examiner in California. “The huge Emporium Centre San Francisco mall that dominates the intersection of Market and Fifth streets is like a large, half-empty ocean cruise liner crashing through stormy seas, with retailers as recently as this month getting ready to jump ship amid the economic headwinds. At the wheel, working to keep the ship aright through the gale, stands Gregg Williams, a receiver appointed in October by a San Francisco Superior Court after the mall’s owners said in June that they would walk away from their mortgage, making him a captain with wide authority and a mandate to stabilize the massive property. Gerard Keena, president of the Bay Area Receivership Group, which provides services similar to Trident’s but on an admittedly smaller scale, said the receivership business was relatively quiet for years but picked up more recently as property owners faced financial difficulties. ‘Now is an exciting time for receivers,’ Keena said.”
Western Producer. “Ag equipment buyers were willing to take almost anything they could get their hands on when the COVID-19 pandemic severely hampered manufacturers’ ability to deliver new machines to customers. That, combined with strong farm commodity prices adding to the demand, drove up the price of used equipment considerably. But now that manufacturing has returned to normal and commodity prices have fallen, the demand for used equipment pulled back.”
“‘The new manufacturers are catching up and supplying the void,’ says Jordan Clarke, senior vice-president and head of Canadian sales at Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers. ‘We’re finding dealerships are putting more into the market on the used side, and we’re being contacted by more dealerships to sell and help with volume. The supply has caught up on everything. There’s definitely been a correction in the marketplace, for sure. If you had to generalize things out, I’d say we’re down maybe 20 per cent in overall pricing. Certain categories are more and others less. With air drills, there are some one-, two- and three-year air drills that are selling as well if not better than they did last year. But the 10,15, 20 (year old), the bottom has fallen out of that age group.’”
Blog TO in Canada. “A Mississauga condo sold at two drastically different price points in two years shows just how much real estate prices in the GTA tend to fluctuate year-over-year. The two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment, located at 80 Absolute Ave., is just across the street from Square One Shopping Centre. The condo was first sold for $751,000 in April 2022, when an uptick in demand skyrocketed prices across the GTA. During this peak, prospective buyers flooded to the region’s real estate market to take advantage of the cheaper borrowing rates. However, prices began to drop once again shortly after when the Bank of Canada started raising interest rates. Just two years later, the same condo apartment was listed for $549,000 and eventually sold below its asking price at $505,000 — representing a loss of nearly $250,000.”
The Independent on the UK. “It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment in Buying London that well and truly turned my stomach. After all, there were so many potential contenders from the first episode of Netflix’s new property series slash love letter to unfettered greed. There was the scene in which Daniel Daggers, founder of the show’s central luxury estate agency DDRE Global, declares that ‘there’s no ‘I’ in team… but there is an ‘I’ in super-prime,’ like high-end property’s answer to David Brent. Or perhaps our introduction to Oli, an agent who dresses like he is constantly on the verge of being summoned to attend a shooting weekend. ‘Us poshos stick together!’ he declares of his wealthy clientele. On reflection, though, the most sickening scene occurs in the agency’s group meeting, when it’s announced that a £25m property has officially been sold, and everyone starts squealing in glee.”
“It sums up everything that’s grotesque about this nightmare fusion of Selling Sunset and Made in Chelsea. The programme is a celebration of pure acquisitiveness that venerates lavish displays of wealth for wealth’s sake, with precisely zero self-awareness. Buying London is just the latest in a string of reality shows obsessed with gawping at the lives and homes of the super-rich. The trend was already feeling tired, but this latest offering is so tone deaf, so unabashedly out of touch, that it makes a convincing case for killing off the micro-genre entirely.”
From ABC News. “On both sides of the Tasman, there are massive shifts on the horizon in the news and production industries, with a raft of closures and cancellations already hitting in New Zealand and mystery surrounding the next moves of one of the world’s biggest media empires. In a sign of just how tough things are in Aotearoa, The Block NZ has been cancelled ahead of its upcoming season and the pre-renovation, unfinished properties put on the market. It’s telling that even a reality show that delivers the audience a play-by-play drama of people competing to win at housing cannot survive. The tough real estate market saw The Block NZ’s 2022 competitors earn just about nothing at auction, while last year’s season was postponed.”
From Barron‘s. “Suffering badly are consumer sentiment and real estate, two areas entwined because housing prices have tumbled since 2021—including 10% since the start of the year—yet property is where most Chinese put their investments and savings, so the slump is causing a freeze on spending. New home prices in April fell for a tenth consecutive month by 0.6% month-on-month, the fastest decline since November 2014. ‘We’re buying basically nothing but food,’ said 58-year-old Zhong Weiyi, who owns an auto dealership just outside the sprawling western city of Chengdu. ‘If property prices start to go back up, then we’ll see,’ Zhong said, adding that both he and his daughter own residences with much of the family’s life savings.”
“Many beleaguered developers have defaulted on at least $124.5 billion of dollar debt, and hundreds of millions of homeowners who once bet on a now-collapsed property bubble have lost much of their life savings. One former deputy head of the statistics bureau said the number of unfinished units that buyers have already paid for could number in the billions, and that there is no guarantee they will ever be finished. Lower-tier cities have been hit the hardest, with vast numbers of unfinished units, for which there is no official figure but which blanket smaller localities across the country.”