A report from Bloomberg. “Eighteen months ago, homes in the booming suburbs north of Nashville wouldn’t even stay on the market for a day, said Don Hackford, a real estate agent in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Nowadays, a developer client recently pulled two homes off the market after getting some low-ball offers. ‘Everything has kind of stagnated, and it’s frustrating for Realtors, because it’s like we’re being shut out,’ Hackford said. ‘There’s no work.’ The number of active single-family home listings in the Punta Gorda area has doubled to 2,143 over the past year. Meantime, the median sale price of a single-family home fell by almost $30,000 to $351,000 in April from a year ago, said Leanne Walker, president of Realtors of Punta Gorda-Port Charlotte-North Port-DeSoto Inc. ‘It has gotten very flat,’ Walker said. ‘It has become very much a buyer’s market. Lots of price reductions happening.’”
KENS San Antonio in Texas. “One study found what was once a seller’s market, isn’t the case now. Part of the reason the tide is starting to turn is because there is slightly larger inventory of homes. Brian Mylar, a realtor with Coldwell Banker Deanne Harper Realtors told KENS 5, ‘You’d like to say it is a sellers market, but there still isn’t enough houses out there to meet the demand, but it’s really not because buyers have a lot of leverage in this situation because the interest rates are a little higher than people would like them right now.’”
“When it comes to buyers, Mylar has this advice: ‘You can dream all you want, but if you don’t have the pre-approval for financing to buy a house, you can’t do anything. Second of all, I guess is be patient and negotiate, because the longer a house has been on the market, the more the seller is going to negotiate with you and drop that price, maybe give you some concessions.’ And when it comes to selling, ‘There aren’t the multiple offer situations. Houses are staying on the market longer. So just be patient. Make sure your house is in great shape. Make sure you market it well. It will sell, but it’s taking a little longer,’ said Mylar.”
Hawaii Real Estate Dreams. “Now each owner wants as much as possible for their condo when the time comes to sell. No one blames them, but when you get no offers the market is telling you something about your pricing or your condo or both. Personally I think it is also now much more about the carrying costs since they are much higher than they used to be. So prices have to drop to make the buyer’s initial investment work for them. Buyers will look at the fees, property taxes, and insurance to tell them if the asking price makes sense for them. Vacation rentals have had a rough month here. The governor signed the bill to make it possible for all counties to change the existing vacation rental zoning without agreement from anyone… sigh. This will create all kinds of issues.”
CBS Sacramento. “With California’s housing needs already sky-high, one Stanislaus County city is facing challenges when trying to build more homes. A 40-home neighborhood in Ceres has sat empty and abandoned for almost two years now. The developer that started pulled out about a month ago, but one city councilwoman, Rosalinda Vierra, in charge of the district said there hasn’t been activity on the lot for over a year. ‘We need to do something and get someone to finish the homes or redo the homes that have been vacant for three years,’ Vierra said. She said the Tuscany Village housing development on Whitmore Avenue is an eyesore.”
“‘It’s coming down to the funding,’ she said. ‘The bank pulled the loans so the developer wasn’t able to retrieve the loans.’ That developer, CBS13 learned, is CEC Homes. Vierra said that CEC Homes slowly moved away from the project about a year ago before completely abandoning it. ‘The builder lost construction and the contractor lost, so that’s when we started seeing squatters and other activities,’ she said. She said homeless people took advantage by breaking in and living inside the homes. Empty shampoo bottles and clothes are still there from their stay. Copper wire was stripped from homes and water heaters installed by the developer were gone. Options for the village are running short. Without an investor, the 40 lots sit empty, and the ones with homes are unfinished.”
The Orange County Register in California. “The former Pacific Life office tower at 45 Enterprise in Aliso Viejo recently sold for $44.2 million, nearly half its listing price of 2023. Not long after it laid off 300 workers, many of them in Orange County, the insurance giant vacated the building, consolidating to its cantilevered, 1970s-era Newport Beach headquarters in the Fashion Island loop. The company listed the Aliso Viejo property in mid-2023 for $80 million, the Orange County Business Journal reported at the time.”
From Bisnow. “After eclipsing office during the pandemic, the once-booming lab real estate market is falling back to Earth. As recent reports and data show, life sciences space is now showing many similarities to other struggling real estate sectors. ‘I think this could be the most challenging Boston life sciences market in quite some time,’ said JLL Executive Managing Director Chad Urie, who focuses on lab real estate. ‘It’s just a completely overbuilt situation.’”
From Fortune. “The rise of private credit over the past decade has been nothing short of monumental. But JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned this week that parts of the burgeoning sector have some of the same problems that the mortgage market had prior to the Great Recession of 2008, including questionable credit ratings from ratings agencies. ‘I’ve seen a couple of these deals that were rated by a ratings agency, and I have to confess it shocked me what they got rated,’ he said at a conference, per Bloomberg. ‘It reminds me a little bit of mortgages.’ Dimon was left wondering what happens ‘if a little old lady finds out that she can’t get her money back. When the sh**t hits the fan—and it will one day, we don’t know when—there will be a lot of stranded borrowers,’ he added.”
CBC News in Canada. “Gary Busch says the Epic Alliance business model smelled like fraud from the start. Today, people who lost their life savings when the Saskatoon real estate investment company collapsed in 2022 are still wondering whether Busch was right. Busch is the broker-owner of Century 21 Fusion in Saskatoon. The veteran Realtor became suspicious of Epic’s practices in June 2020. ‘There’s a company and they’re buying 20 to 30 houses a month, and these prices are being inflated,’ he said in an interview. ‘And I don’t know what’s going on for sure, but I think there could be some mortgage fraud, or there’s some manipulation of facts here. We’re not Toronto. We’re not going up 50 per cent in a year. That does not happen here, so it was very out of character that these houses were suddenly worth $50,000 more … it just didn’t feel right, didn’t look right.’”
“The hundreds of homes Epic bought for investors — and was supposed to manage for them — were turned back to the investors in 2022 when it folded. Lena Jerabek is a British Columbia investor who also wants answers. ‘I would like to know where the money went,’ she said. ‘There are people that lost their life savings, their retirement. I spoke to a lot of them. I spent hours on the phone with people and investors across Canada.’ Jerabek and her husband loaned Epic Alliance $280,000 in 2021 to buy a home in the Meadowgreen neighbourhood in Saskatoon. The idea was to renovate the property and then sell it for a profit. The home was eventually appraised at $255,000. Jerabek said the couple is in the final stages of selling the house, ‘and I will take a loss.’”
The Globe and Mail in Canada. “In the past, it was marijuana grow operations that posed a costly nuisance for landlords. Today, it’s people who are willing to flout the law to make easy cash on a site like Airbnb, willing to risk the consequences of fines – if they face any consequences at all. ‘Unfortunately, I think there’s a huge group that are [saying], ‘just giving me the slap on the wrist. I’ll make my money and I’ll pay my fine.’ It’s the cost of doing business, of [saying] ‘I’m going to go bump the rules and I know all the ways around it, and there’s so much protection for tenants that I’m going to use it now to my benefit,’ says Mark Teasdale, chief operations officer for Vancouver property management company Unique Real Estate Accommodations.”
“Mr. Teasdale, who is also a computer programmer, did his own data search and found 213 cases of Airbnb listings in Vancouver that do not have a valid licence with the city. He says that is a conservative figure. He is also aware that there are desperate owners who’ve been hit hard by the change in rules – people who’d invested in properties who can no longer count on short-term rental incomes that had been thousands of dollars a month. Properties that might have brought in $8,000 a month as short-term rentals may only get $3,000 a month on long-term rental contracts. ‘There’s a lot of people that have a lot invested and they’re going bankrupt. And they’re just saying, ‘Screw it. I’m going to continue doing it the way I am.’”
Domain News in Australia. “As many as one in 30 households have fallen behind on their mortgage repayments in a string of western Sydney suburbs and the Illawarra. Some 3.53 per cent of home loans in Abbotsbury in Sydney’s south-west are at least 30 days in arrears, Moody’s Ratings warns, as owners are hard hit by higher interest rates and the rising cost of living. Mortgage broker Rob Lees is seeing households under pressure cut their discretionary spending to manage their mortgage repayments. He referred one couple to their bank’s hardship arrangements even though both were working. They had savings to draw on, but their funds had almost run out. ‘People that took out very big loans when rates were very low, it tends to be if people have million-dollar type loans even with two incomes that tends to be the people who are saying they’re struggling,’ Lees said.”
Radio New Zealand. “Extra work – and fewer sales – may be prompting some real estate sales people to leave the industry. Brooke Gibson has been a real estate salesperson for 18 months. It has been a tougher market than in years prior and she says salespeople are having to work harder. ‘To be honest, it’s a buyer’s market. We are having more problems with finding buyers.’ In late 2020, at the busiest time of the market, more than 10,000 houses changed hands in a single month. That number was 5559 in April – or about one sale for every three licensed industry participants. Meanwhile, the national median sale price has dropped from $925,000 in November 2021 to $790,000 last month.”
“Gibson has not seen salespeople in her office leave yet but is aware of some in other firms who are taking on full-time jobs and just “moonlighting” in real estate. ‘I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of it yet,’ Gibson said. ‘You do what you do to get through. Tough times make strong people and we’ll see the good ones hang around. It’s been so easy for so long there are people who probably shouldn’t be here.’”
From Biz Community. “‘In South Africa, we can expect our own election to put the property market into a temporary holding pattern, dragging on the subtle buyer’s market we have been experiencing’ says Renier Kriek, managing director at Sentinel Homes. ‘If you want to buy, buy now and don’t be put off by sentiment-driven hesitance that currently prevails in the market election sentiment,’ advises Kriek. ‘In the South African property property market, due to structural factors, what goes down must eventually come up.’”