A report from the Arizona Republic. “When Phoenix leaders set a goal to create or save 50,000 houses in a decade to improve home affordability, the Housing Director at the time questioned if it could be done. Four years later, the city is 80% of the way to its target and likely to surpass its goal this year or next. But as the city nears completion of its housing goal far ahead of schedule, and a housing affordability crisis still plagues the region, the question becomes: What does the city do next to solve the problem? ‘Because we have so much growth in the Phoenix region, it really doesn’t matter how many housing units we’re building. The growth exceeds the number of housing units, so rents keep going up,’ said David King, an urban planning professor at Arizona State University. ‘If Phoenix says that they’re 80% of the way to their goals for affordable housing, what’s the big goal that they haven’t achieved yet? Affordability. Phoenix is less affordable now than it was five years ago,’ he added. ‘So, there’s something missing in these plans.’”
The Scottsdale Progress in Arizona. “Home sellers’ position at bargaining tables in the Valley may be slipping as inventory rises and demand remains in low gear, according to a leading analyst of the Phoenix Metro housing market. The Cromford Report said last week said that while sellers’ advantage at the bargaining table has been gaining in five of the 17 Valley submarkets, 12 others are slipping – including in Scottsdale. ‘The re-sale market is cooling as supply continues to climb while demand remains subdued,’ it said, adding that the number of listings without a contract ‘represents a balanced market with buyers finding plenty of supply to choose from and sellers experiencing more competition from each other than they have for most of the last decade.’”
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time for sellers to hit the panic button, although it noted, ‘Sellers are nervous and buyers are unenthusiastic. We are not in a buyer’s market overall, but some significant markets are. If current trends continue then more areas could join them.’ ‘This weakness is not encouraging,’ the Cromford Report added, noting that re-sale homes are facing increasing pressure from the new-home market. ‘Supply continues to rise, although slowly and the current trends are suggesting continued deterioration for sellers,’ it warned. ‘It would not be a surprise if demand were to fall enough to match the supply of active listings over the next several weeks.’”
KFSN in California. “In May, it took an average of 28 days to sell a home in Fresno. JP Shamshoian, the CEO of Realty Concepts, says the industry environment is a little more buyer friendly now than it has been in years past – when many people lost out in a very competitive market. Shamshoian believes you shouldn’t pass on a property if you come across your dream home which fits all your needs. ‘I know a lot of people out there, a lot of my friends, a lot of my family members – both on the investment side and and on the residents side, who say, ‘golly, four years ago I wanted to buy but I was waiting for prices to come down and now they’re kicking themselves because they didn’t buy and they missed that opportunity,’ said Shamshoian.”
The San Francisco Chronicle in California. “When Bryan Wynwood got his start as a real estate agent in Joshua Tree 20 years ago, it was just ‘a rural, dusty little town.’ In the past decade, word spread, but nothing compared to the boom the area saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. Plus, homebuyers knew they could turn their purchase into an Airbnb if they didn’t want to settle in the desert full time. ‘It was not realistic,’ Wynwood said. ‘The pandemic created a stampede from the city, bidding homes up to unsustainable highs. Frenzied buyers rushed in and that itself pushed the prices up.’ The problem was, Wynwood said, very few of the new purchasers had experience running a vacation rental and were just ‘buying the dream of the Airbnb.’”
“Madalaine LaVoie, a real estate agent who has been working in the area for 30 years, said most tourists are only visiting the desert on the weekend, leaving vacation rentals sitting empty and not earning revenue during the week. If they bought a home for too high a price, the numbers simply don’t work. ‘If you bought in 2021, or early 2022, those people all got hurt,’ she said. Wynwood said he hasn’t seen a huge uptick in foreclosures yet, but he does expect to see more coming. This year he’s sold five — getting outreach from banks is not something he was used to.”
“It might feel like 2019 in terms of sales volume, but prices are nothing like they were five years ago. In Joshua Tree, the median sale price in April 2024 was $326,000, more than 50% higher than the April 2019 median price of $213,000, according to Redfin data. In Yucca Valley, it’s up 106%. Still, prices have come down from pandemic heights, bidding wars are much less common, and some properties are sitting on the market much longer. ‘Now we have limited buyer demand because that rush to flee the city has subsided, work from home has subsided. Demand for rural real estate has subsided,’ Wynwood said, adding that it’s definitely a buyer’s market. ‘There is still too much inventory and not enough buyer demand,’ he said. ‘There are lots of good deals out there.’”
Bisnow on California. “The heavy fog over San Francisco’s commercial real estate market may be slowly dissipating. The cautiously optimistic CRE community knows structural headwinds like inflation and its large remote workforce are still challenges to overcome. But in the words of Prado Group CEO Dan Safier, ‘It’s a good time to be investing right now, given how far things have fallen.’ Office landlords are still offering concessions and tenant improvement allowances in light of the city’s 35% vacancy rate. ‘We are seeing pockets of strength, but you have to be selective,’ Safier said. ‘It needs to be walkable, safe and clean.’”
“Yet while leasing has gained momentum, stubbornly high interest rates have shut down virtually all San Francisco property sales involving equity. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it, and I worked in commercial real estate in the ’90s,’ said Arden Hearing, executive general manager of development for Lendlease’s West region. ‘The capital markets are just not looking at San Francisco right now.’”
The Miami Herald in Florida. “The eight story Courthouse Place office building in downtown Fort Lauderdale is a couple blocks from the Broward County courthouse, which makes it an attractive home for the dozens of lawyers and legal services companies that rent space in the building. It even houses a few offices for prosecutors in Broward’s Drug Trafficking and Economic Crimes units. That would seem to make it an unlikely destination for money launderers to invest drug trafficking proceeds, but federal prosecutors say it was purchased as part of a real estate buying spree fueled by drug proceeds.”
“Sefira Capital, a Miami-based real estate investment firm, was accused by federal prosecutors in a 2021 civil forfeiture complaint of accepting millions of dollars worth of drug trafficking proceeds to fund its investments in commercial real estate in Florida and several other states between 2016 and 2019. It bought Courthouse Place in April 2017. The fact that the company didn’t face any criminal consequences shows how the current legal framework, which doesn’t require firms like Sefira to vet the source of their funds, limits the penalties for those who enable these money laundering transactions. In the civil forfeiture complaint, prosecutors alleged that money invested by Sefira had been laundered through the Black Market Peso Exchange, a shadow financial system used by drug traffickers in Mexico and other countries to convert tainted U.S. dollars obtained from drug sales into clean currency in their native countries.”
The Vancouver Sun in Canada. “It pained Emi Herawati to cut back on the money she regularly sent to her family back in Indonesia, including her seven-year-old grandson, but she was left with no choice after she lost her retirement savings. The notary public who worked with her on the property sale told her he could help her invest the money from the transaction, according to an investigation by the B.C. Society of Notaries Public. That notary, Jitendra Desai, then ‘brokered a deal’ for Herawati to take the net proceeds from the sale of her home — totalling $200,000 — and invest it as a mortgage loan on a residential property in Vancouver, the regulator has alleged in a continuing disciplinary matter against Desai. Desai told Herawati that ‘the borrowers were ‘solid’ borrowers, but failed to advise the total amount of mortgages exceeded the value of the property on which (she) was lending.”
“When Herawati wasn’t repaid on time as per their agreement, she raised concerns with Desai over several months in 2023. The paperwork said the borrower was Surinder Gill, but the point of contact was always Surinder’s husband, Tarsem Singh Gill, Herawati said. At the time, she didn’t realize he was the man accused, 16 years earlier, of orchestrating one of the largest real estate frauds in Canadian history. When Herawati wasn’t repaid on time as per their agreement, she raised concerns with Desai over several months in 2023.”
“Eventually, in response to her concerns, Desai arranged a meeting last September in his Vancouver office with Gill and Herawati as well as her friend, Mike Brown, who was helping her through the process. By that time, Brown had researched Gill’s background, and when he raised the five outstanding criminal charges at the meeting, Gill calmly replied with something like: ‘They’ve been trying to get me for years. And I’m still standing,’ said Brown. ‘When he said that, I wanted to jump across the desk and strangle him,’ Brown said recently. Herawati took her case to the police. After the file was forwarded to the Vancouver Police Department’s financial crime unit for review, an officer emailed her offering sympathy, but urging her to contact a civil lawyer instead.”
Guelph Today in Canada.”It’s been nearly a year since Ryan Bedrosian bought his first home – a three-bedroom backsplit in the city’s west end – with dreams of fixing it up and moving in with his fiance, to whom he proposed days after the purchase was finalized. The plan was to tear the interior down to the studs and essentially rebuild the living space before moving in by the end of 2023. That didn’t happen. Instead, Bedrosian continues to live with his parents as he tries to get a group of alleged squatters removed from the Elmira Road home he bought through a bank sale – all the while making loan payments and watching as the house’s water and electricity bills climb. Bedrosian says he is out about $50,000 and counting.”
“‘I feel betrayed,” Bedrosian said, referring to what he perceives as indifference from the City of Guelph and local police, as well as by the legal system he feels has left his life in limbo. ‘You’re helpless. You have zero control of what’s happening to you.’”
The Age in Australia. “Landlords in the city’s inner north could have their rates doubled, while owner-occupiers and local businesses get a 50 per cent reduction, under a contentious plan to address the housing crisis to be debated by a Melbourne council this week. Merri-bek Council is being asked by independent councillor James Conlan to investigate how it could introduce a new ‘differential rate’ for residential property investors aimed at pushing them to sell, making more homes available to first home buyers. ‘Anyone owning two or more properties may in the vast majority of cases have a greater capacity to pay,’ Conlan outlined in his motion,. ‘Unlike owner-occupiers and renters, investors can sell at least one residential property without making themselves homeless.’”
“But Australian Landlords Association president Andrew Kent said it was ‘oversimplistic’ to assume the sale of a current rental property would mean it would be affordable for a first home buyer. ‘People should be asking why investors are leaving the market and rents are going up,’ he said.”
From Newshub. “Caleb Paterson, of Paterson Luxury, has just sold a 440-square-metre, five-bedroom, four-bathroom luxury home in the north Auckland suburb of Dairy Flat. He won’t reveal the exact sale price, except to say it was between $4 million and $5 million and the owners are selling to retire across the ditch. ‘They have sold their whole portfolio of properties because they feel retirement in Australia is going to be better than what it would be here,’ he told Newshub. New Zealand doesn’t record occupations or net assets when people leave, so there is no data to support Paterson’s experience.”
“The housing market is reflecting the tough times and the luxury segment is no different. Estate agents also say there are more listings and properties are taking longer to sell. Ollie Wall works for Wall Estate Agents, an agency which sells the very top end of the luxury market in suburbs like Auckland’s Herne Bay. ‘I don’t think the demand is less, but I think people are a little bit more discerning and they’re taking their time to make a decision,’ Wall told Newshub. ‘There’s just less pressure on buyers at the moment because there’s that sort-of fear of missing out that has disappeared.’”