It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “Palm Beach County collected record returns from its $5 billion investment portfolio, but a sharp increase in property foreclosures raises some concerns about future revenue, according to the county’s top finance official. Comptroller Joseph Abruzzo told commissioners that property foreclosures rose last year to more than 2,400 cases, nearly double the total from 2022. He said he expects foreclosure numbers to climb due in part to adjustable mortgage rates and high interest rates. ‘It’s really a changing marketplace on interest rates and the overall workforce is changing before our very eyes,’ said Abruzzo. ‘They [property owners] were paying 2% to 3% and then all of a sudden they’re paying 7% to 8%,’ he said in noting the rising interest rates.”
“Several times throughout the home-buying process, Jorge wanted to throw in the towel. But his wife encouraged him to continue working with the lender. And earlier this month, he received the keys to his new home. He first seriously considered buying a home when he realized rent was becoming increasingly unaffordable in Pilsen — a historic port of entry for immigrants. He discovered the complexities of the home-buying process and how expensive it can be, especially for people like him who are undocumented. Jorge, who worked with a counselor at the Resurrection Project, took out a loan with 7.6 % interest. ‘I don’t know if that is a lot or a little,’ said Torres.”
“Geovanni Costales, senior loan originator at Devon Bank, said that creating these home financing opportunities in Chicago can help ITIN holders take a significant step toward building generational wealth. ‘Within five years, their situation could change,’ said Costales. ‘They can either sell their property or refinance. If they become a citizen at that point, we can transition them to a path toward a conventional mortgage. The key point here is to let the client have access to the property, and that’s really what will drive wealth for that individual.’”
“The years since the depths of the pandemic have been pretty good for construction spending in this economy. Yet construction spending actually declined between April and May, according to new data from the Census Bureau. ‘You just can’t make a love connection. Because there are people who want housing, but they can’t afford what builders are able to supply under current circumstances. And that’s where we are,’ said Anirban Basu, chief economist of Associated Builders and Contractors. He expects this downward trend to continue.”
“Easing rents in certain markets are partly due to an increase in supply: A flood of new apartment rentals is coming online. About 90,300 new apartments were completed in the fourth quarter of last year, the second-highest number on record, Redfin said. The only time when completions were higher was in the second quarter of 2023. In some markets, such as the Sun Belt, where there is a significant oversupply of apartment rentals, ‘developers are reporting that properties … are seeing monthly lease signings at about half the historical rate,’ Jay Lybik, the national director of multifamily analytics at CoStar, told MarketWatch.”
“What comes up often comes down, and lumber prices came down hard as demand decelerated and supply ramped up to a speed that’s no longer necessary. ‘It’s low and slow, and it’s kind of been that way for a while,’ said Stinson Dean, the CEO of Deacon Lumber, a lumber trading company. ‘A large part of the industry is losing money at these prices right now.’ Paul Jannke, a principal at Forest Economic Advisors, said this housing-market malaise is a big problem for the lumber industry. ‘There’s so much wood,’ Jannke said.”
“New eco-friendly town homes in Millcreek illustrate the shifting sands of trying to meet Utah’s housing demands these days. Throw a shoe in any direction around Opus Green, and you are likely to hit a multistory residential building that’s gone up since Millcreek incorporated as a city at the end of 2016. After building upward of 3,000 rentals in more urban settings, ClearWater CEO Micah Peters changed course about five years ago amid a looming glut of so-called podium-style apartments, usually with a commercial ground floor and multiple stories of rentals above. ‘The dirty little secret in development that no one ever talks about is that build-to-rent is a zero-sum game,’ the CEO said, ‘with massive negative cash flow for the foreseeable future.’ And as interest rates have risen above 5%, he added, ‘you’re just kind of servicing debt and praying interest rates come down again.’”
“Kelly Ryan McCandless, 53, of Rexburg, was sentenced to 65 months in federal prison following his convictions for defrauding his partners out of more than $580,000, U.S. Attorney Josh Hurwit announced. According to court records, in 2017, McCandless and two others formed a partnership to build a 96-bed student housing property in Rexburg, Idaho. Over the course of the next year, however, and beginning with the very first bank withdrawal, McCandless falsified subcontractor invoices and bank withdrawal requests. He unlawfully used subcontractors’ signatures to withdraw loan proceeds from the bank at a higher amount than what was invoiced to build the project. The bank relied on those documents and wired McCandless the proceeds from the loan. McCandless continued this scheme for months and improperly took approximately $580,000, which he used to purchase personal items like a brand-new pickup truck, several snow mobiles, several dirt bikes, toy haulers, a Jeep, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, $5,000 in dental work, vacations, among other expenditures.”
“‘Like many fraudsters, McCandless was motivated by greed, lining his pockets with the embezzled money and spending it on expensive toys for himself,’ said Shohini Sinha of the Salt Lake City FBI. ‘While he may have benefited in the short term, he will now be held accountable for betraying and defrauding his victims.’”
“Residents in the Macanta neighborhood in Douglas County aren’t giving up their fight to protect the views they say they were promised. The community is just northeast of Castle Rock, off Crowfoot Valley Road. Homeowners say they were sold on the idea of protected open space. But now, the developer wants to build more homes. Neighbors say they paid a higher lot fee to live among nature and were told this 23-acre parcel of land would remain undeveloped. Since our initial story, other neighbors have reached out to CBS News Colorado saying they were victims of the same bait and switch in the neighborhood. ‘The advertisements on their website, posts in our clubhouse, people made homebuying decisions based on the open space that was advertised,’ said Sheridan Lofman. She wants to protect the nature and views she chose as her backyard, as well as her property values.”
“Grab a coffee at the Golden Pear in Southampton, New York, drive due south almost a mile straight down Main Street, take a left onto Gin Lane. The storied street, one of the most exclusive in the Hamptons, runs parallel to the ocean. Louise Blouin and John MacBain. bought the estate for a reported $13.5 million in late 1997 and renamed it La Dune. Blouin had made a fortune with MacBain, creating an international classified ad empire. La Dune was the perfect place to show off their success. But the couple, who brought their own strengths to the business, were growing apart. By 2000, they had divorced. And now Blouin has finally lost La Dune. The estate was sold in a bankruptcy sale this winter. She is crying foul and unfair play, mulling her options to sue everyone. ‘I don’t pay things. When you are a chairman and CEO of a global company, you don’t pay things,’ she said via Zoom. And then, a few breaths later, ‘I paid everyone, they stole the money on the other side.’”
“As for the house, ‘she has seller’s remorse,’ said John Allerding, a lawyer for Bay Point Advisors, Blouin’s last lender. If there had been a minimum reserve bid, ‘we would have had no bidders and we would be in the same position as we were when we got involved in September 2022: two properties that nobody wanted, generating expenses.’ One banker, who attended a lunch prepared by Blouin’s private chef on a terrace overlooking the ocean last summer, ultimately turned down her refinancing request. ‘When people live above their means against assets they have or inherited in order to tread water, it typically doesn’t end well. Nobody thought it was worth $150 million. It felt like Grey Gardens, with faded Hiroshi Sugimoto seascape photographs on the wall,’ he says. Such grand old houses, he notes, ‘get really beaten down by the ocean.’”
“There are 31,000 super commuters in San Joaquin County. Most of those that earn such a designation by driving three plus hours a day commuting reside in Tracy, Manteca, Lathrop, Mountain House, and Stockton. Data released by the United States Census Bureau has both San Joaquin and Lake counties with the highest percent of super commuters in Northern California. In the 2019 Census data regarding super commuters before the pandemic hit, almost 11 percent of San Joaquin County’s commuters were on the road for three plus hours a day. The latest data has 8 percent of Stanislaus County’s workforce labeled as super commuters. Super commuting was a growing problem throughout the 2010s, as metropolitan areas grew outward and workers moved further from job centers in search of affordable housing and homeownership. California has two of the nation’s top five super commuter regions — the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Others are in Seattle, New York, and Washington, D.C.”
“More buyers had been expected to enter the market after the early June interest-rate cut. But as more homeowners continue to put their properties up for sale, prospective buyers have faced less and less competition. ‘Buyers are feeling that there’s choice and there’s no rush,’ said Josie Stern, a realtor with Sutton Group-Associates Realty Inc., who has sold homes in Toronto for 35 years. She said with the increase in inventory, buyers ‘feel emboldened. They don’t feel like they have to buy right now.’ At the end of last month, there were 23,613 active listings – the highest volume since 2010. The home price index, which excludes the priciest properties, was $1,092,100 last month. That was 4.8-per-cent lower than June of last year. Homes prices lost the most value in the regions to the west of the city of Toronto. Year over year, the home price index in Halton and Peel were down by 5 per cent and 6 per cent, respectively.”
“A handful of recent sales suggest that some buyers who paid high prices for southern Ontario homes in 2022 are selling at significant losses. According to a listing on HouseSigma a one-bedroom, one-bathroom condo unit located at 304-1408 Bishops Gate just sold for $420,000 in May–down 36 per cent from its sale price of $657,000 in February 2022.”
“There is an oversupply of rental housing in Helsinki. Retta Management, the management company behind a newly completed high-rise in Kalasatama, Helsinki, is presently offering new tenants a 50-per-cent discount on rent for the first month. The company has earlier sought to attract tenants to the building by offering a 500-euro gift card to the Mall of Tripla. Its website indicates that 48 of the 240 flats in the building, which was completed at the end of last year, are vacant. ‘That’s an indication of the general market situation especially in the capital region,’ analysed Eemeli Karlsson, an economist at the Finnish Landlord Association. ‘The supply is considerably greater than it’s been for decades. The situation is completely different than four years ago, when people were waiting for flats.’”
“Bulldogs forward Liam Knight has taken a tough loss in the sale of his Vaucluse pad. The former South Sydney star was spotted moving out of the Old South Head Rd home over the weekend and property records reveal the home was sold in May, just 16 months after Knight bought it for $1.625m. The sale price was not disclosed but given the home was slapped with a $1.4m buyer’s guide through PPD agents Alexander Phillips and Thomas Fuller, Knight likely copped a loss on the home, possibly in the vicinity of $250,000. The pricing was somewhat surprising, given PropTrack had calculated the median apartment price has risen 13 per cent in the past 12 months prior to the home being listed, based on 71 sales.”
“Announced in 2006, Forest City was supposed to be a luxury housing project located on a small reclaimed island off south-west Johor. It launched a decade later, but as of August 2023, the joint venture between Chinese property developers Country Garden and a private Malaysian company backed by the state government of Johor and its sultan, remained unfinished, with only RM20 billion (S$5.8 billion) invested by Country Garden out of the announced US$100 billion (S$135 billion). While Forest City was meant to have a capacity of 700,000 people, less than 10,000 people live there currently — which makes it a great spot to film game shows and documentaries.”
“The third episode of season two saw the 10 remaining members of the group heading to Forest City, with the contestants exclaiming with excitement at the high-rise apartments. ‘We see these buildings as we’re rolling up, and they’re all like out of a King Kong movie, it’s crazy,’ contestant Sean Patrick Bryan said in a talking-head interview. ‘And I’m thinking, ‘Yo, what am I doing here?’ After the contestants came into a multi-storey carpark, their host, Ari Shapiro, described the city as ‘a perfect spot for a glamorous holiday home, for those who can afford it. And, most of the year, they lie empty.’”
“The Delhi Development Authority’s (DDA) condo project in Dwarka has run into hot waters with allottees complaining that the houses are nowhere near completion while questioning the quality of construction. The buyers also said that despite the houses at the Dwarka Golf View Condos being incomplete, they had been asked to pay the remaining 25% of the flat’s cost. The complaints included loose wall plaster crumbling when pressed by hands, weak cementing and brick quality, non-curing of cement, steel bars projecting from finished walls, improperly installed electrical conduits, glaring gaps between the wall as well as door and window frames, cracks and seepage on ceilings, loosely anchored railings on verandas, among many others.”
“‘We feel a deep sense of betrayal, we feel cheated…people have ended up paying almost 50 to 100 per cent premiums on these flats,’ said an allottee who requested to remain anonymous.”