A report from Maui Now in Hawaii. “Closings of condominium sales have dropped by double-digit percentages in the three months since Mayor Richard Bissen announced a proposal to phase out thousands of short-term rentals. Bissen said the downward trend in condo sales volume is a positive indication toward housing affordability for island residents. ‘It makes sense that uncertainty around the TVR phaseout could be impacting the condo resale market,’ he said. ‘This data shows that condo owners, the vast majority of whom are not local owner-occupants, are more interested in selling, and fewer buyers are interested in paying the higher prices of the recent past.’”
The Daily Mail. “Jackson Hole, Wyoming, once a quaint mountain retreat, has transformed into one of America’s wealthiest counties and a playground for the ultra-rich. Sales in the $2-3 million market are currently the most stagnant, the report showed. Some properties are appraising lower than contract prices, forcing sellers to renegotiate, Devon Viehman, a local real estate expert explained. ‘Things that are priced to the market are still selling quickly,’ she said. Viehman suggests that sellers adjust their expectations, as ‘pandemic pricing is done.’ ‘If sellers can get that out of their mind and realize that was just this little blip in time,’ Viehman said.”
Consumer Affairs. “Nearly a third of homes stayed on the market for more than 30 days across the entire U.S. as of July 2024, according to Realtor.com data. At the same time, searches for ‘sell my house’ have shot up nearly 70% in the last month, pointing to a strong desire to move that is often met with extended wait times, Nathan Richardson of Cash For Home told ConsumerAffairs. The longer wait times in Ohio and Massachusetts highlight specific challenges in the states, including high housing costs in Ohio and a glut of homes for sale in Massachusetts, Richardson said. Home sales hit their lowest level in nearly three decades in 2023 and haven’t been much better in 2024. ‘While we’ve experienced a historically hot seller’s market in recent years, that trend is slowly shifting,’ Richardson said.”
The Epoch Times. “The dramatic rise in median home prices in New York City and other busy real estate markets from pre-pandemic levels has driven buyers throughout the country to pursue a range of innovative solutions they might never have considered four or five years ago, brokers and real estate lawyers have told The Epoch Times. Tyler Whitman, a broker at the New York City-based firm The Agency Re and his colleagues also work with sellers, he said, and they counsel sellers not to be taken aback if an offer comes in significantly lower than expected. ‘We’re representing sellers, and we’re preparing them ahead of time, telling them people are starting low with offers and not to be offended. They should respond to all offers. The buyer’s testing the owner, and you can test them back,’ said Whitman.”
WFLA in Florida. “The water level in the Laurel Meadows subdivision of Sarasota County has gone down enough for people to return to their homes and begin the long process of clean up and recovery. Greg Gregory said the reality of it all is just starting to hit him. His wife, Kim, said she’s not sure how they will be able to repair all of the damage to their home. ‘I don’t have the money to fix my home, and so far, we’re not getting any help, none,’ Kim Gregory said. Like many in the neighborhood, they don’t have flood insurance. ‘We need FEMA; why are they not helping us?’ Kim Gregory said.”
The Wall Street Journal on California. “San Francisco’s hospitality business imploded during the pandemic. Now, its hotel owners are drowning in bad debt as never before. In the city’s metropolitan area, the delinquency rate among commercial mortgage-backed security loans for the lodging sector skyrocketed to 41.6% in June from 5.7% in June 2023, according to Trepp. It is the largest increase across the country’s 25 largest metro areas. The city’s two largest hotels, the Hilton Parc 55 and Hilton San Francisco Union Square, combined have lost $1 billion in value, according to the Kroll Bond Rating Agency, which valued them at $553.8 million. Exiting the two hotels ‘meaningfully improved our balance sheet and operating metrics,’ said Tom Baltimore, the firm’s chief executive during a first-quarter earnings call. The San Francisco market, alongside Los Angeles, will ‘probably lag for some time,’ he said.”
“Hannah Lin, a room attendant at the Union Square Hilton, said her hours were dramatically cut at the hotel. With less pay, she’s cut her spending to just basics. She also took up a second job at the Oracle Ballpark. ‘I chose a San Francisco hotel because they have stable schedules,” she said. Now, ‘the only thing we can do is look for side jobs.’”
NBC San Diego in California. “As you drive along streets in the Spring Valley neighborhood of San Diego County there are homeless encampments scattered about. Those encampments are causing concern for many people in the community. ‘Recently we’ve been getting more and more encampments everywhere,’ Spring Valley resident Julia Wolfe said. ‘There’s grown men and people living on our streets like right next to our homes. It’s very loud, it’s aggressive. They hang signs with profanity and vulgarity they block up the sidewalks so in some areas nobody can walk past them anymore. Families can’t go on walks, wheelchairs aren’t accessible and then on top of that, everybody leaves their trash.’”
“Some residents said they’re contemplating relocating because of the encampments near their home. ‘I don’t want to leave but sometimes I think about it. I just want to get away and get to a place where I don’t see this,’ resident Elise Rodriguez said.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer in Pennsylvania. “When Lauren Bruce moved to Hart Lane, in February 2023, she was ready to embrace her new neighborhood. She and her partner shared a vision of starting a community garden on nearby vacant lots. Instead, the couple found themselves in an all-out Kensington turf war. For them, the front line was their front steps, where nearly every day they tried to chase off drug dealers hustling bags of fentanyl. The dealers would tell them defiantly, ‘This is a drug corner’ — and a few times tagged the couple’s car with graffiti, or smeared it with ketchup and mustard.”
“But ground zero sat just 100 feet away. Neighbors knew it as ‘Triple X,’ a fenced-in compound that encompassed two vacant lots and an empty storefront that once housed an adult bookstore and alleged prostitution front, with a fading ‘XXX’ sign above the door. A real-estate speculator, Adam Ehrlich, had bought the empty building in 2020, adding it to a portfolio of more than 125 properties in Kensington, and close to 800 citywide. One day last year, she confronted Ehrlich about the chaos. His reply, Bruce said, echoed what the drug dealers on the block often told her: Kensington is a rough neighborhood. If they couldn’t handle it, they should leave. ‘It’s a rough neighborhood because you’re making it that way,’ Bruce, 40, shot back.”
The Globe and Mail. “For much of the past decade, I spent time going back and forth between the United States and Canada. It used to be the case, especially after the election of Justin Trudeau in 2015, that when returning to Canada I was greeted by good news. The country was imbued with a sense of optimism. Those years seem so long ago. The Canada of 2024 feels like a different country. When I returned to Canada in late 2023, I was shocked by what I saw and heard. It felt as if almost everyone I encountered now, of all ethnicities, backgrounds and ages, were angry.”
“Friends complained about the impossibility of buying a home − homes that had been affordable when their parents came to Canada. Family members worried about car thefts and other crimes. People were making plans to leave − even those who had recently arrived. Nor was this limited to my immediate circle. In conversations at the local YMCA, the coffee shop and around Toronto, there was a genuine, visceral frustration. People felt stifled by the dismal state of the economy and the poor state of housing. They were working harder and, thanks to inflation, making less. The price of food (and everything else) was rising. They worried about their kids’ safety. There was a ceiling on their ambitions. The political leadership of the country had failed them, time and again, and was now unable to address ordinary people’s concerns.”
“Driving through the Greater Toronto Area, I saw how much more congested everything had become. There were too many people with too few places to live. The increasing number of homeless people on the street. The rise in violent crime. The staggering toll of the opioid crisis. The unprecedented wave of international students, many of whom were sold a bill of goods that turned out to be faulty. The hangover from COVID-19 restrictions, almost a form of national PTSD. The pervasive feeling that success is out of reach in Canada, and even if you work hard and are successful, the government will come collecting more than they need − and then proceed to waste it, overspend it or lose it.”
“When the law loses its power to deter crime, either because of prosecutors not moving forward with cases, or because of a general laissez-faire attitude toward violent crime happening in other neighbourhoods, it is the marginalized who are harmed most. Yet, Canadians cannot even read or share news on social-media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. It is an Orwellian experience − in the literal sense − to see one’s own articles censored and silenced in a country calling itself a democracy. The excesses of superficial progressivism have been laid bare. Cultural virtue-signalling at the expense of substantive economic progress has corroded the values of progressive politics. It was easy to blame Donald Trump when he was president; it’s much harder to deflect criticism now.”
From Reuters. “German commercial property prices fell 7.4% in the second quarter from a year earlier but showed signs of stabilisation, the VDP banking association said on Monday, as the country’s real estate sector grapples with its worst crisis in decades. ‘The situation in the commercial property market remains tense,’ VDP’s Chief Executive Jens Tolckmitt said. German property lender Aareal, which has a big footprint in the United States, last week disclosed a 26% increase in loans for offices that were likely to go unpaid during the second quarter.”
ABC News in Australia. “Aaron Webb’s street has a dozen Airbnbs. He and his partner — a teacher at a local school — rent metres near the beach on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. In June, the region had 13,000 short-term stays but fewer than a thousand homes to rent, according to data from Queensland University and SQM Research. Mr Webb fears they’ll be pushed out when their lease ends. Mr Webb says the houses around him are empty in the off-season, which is hard to see in such a competitive rental market. ‘Politicians need to decide what kind of place they want this to be. Do they want it to be a pure tourist destination like in Europe?’ he says. ‘Or do they really tighten it up, and go ‘hang on a minute, you can’t just have these houses vacant for months of the year when we’ve got people struggling to find places to rent.’”
“Urban geographer and Associate Professor Thomas Sigler says the housing crisis has deeper roots than new platforms to spruik short-term lets. ‘It goes right down to the sort of philosophical underpinnings of home ownership and whether a human being should be allowed to own one or even two or three properties,’ he says. ‘The problem is the financialisation of housing and the fact that we’ve allowed housing to be a speculative financial commodity when in fact it should be a social good like it is in Europe.’”
South China Morning Post. “Hong Kong developers show no sign of slowing down project launches in coming months even as high interest rates continue to dampen demand for new homes and hold prices down, according to analysts. Nearly 10,000 flats in 24 new properties are tipped to launch before year-end, matching the 9,911 units put on offer in 27 projects in the first seven months, according to Midland Realty. Developers were able to sell about 4,800 or a little over 48 per cent of the flats made available to buyers in the January to July period, Midland said. The long-term supply of new flats in Hong Kong also remains robust, with 1,416 private homes completed in June, a five-month high and nearly 17 times higher than the 80 units completed in May.”
“In the next three to four years, as many as 109,000 new flats are expected to flood Hong Kong, according to the housing bureau. ‘Given the current market inventory exceeding 22,000 new units, developers have adopted a strategy of prioritising sales volume over pricing, to sell the properties actively in the market, in order to maintain a balance between market supply and absorption,’ said Sammy Po Siu-ming, CEO of Midland Realty’s residential division for Hong Kong and Macau.”
“The supply glut is one factor keeping home prices in check. Recent launches have been priced lower than comparable flats nearly a decade ago. In May, the average price of a new class A unit, defined as a flat of less than 431 sq ft, in Yau Ma Tei was HK$20,346 (US$2,611) per square foot, a 10.6 per cent decrease from HK$22,768 in 2015, according to a study by JLL. Meanwhile, in Kennedy Town, average per-square-foot prices are down 6 per cent to HK$22,022 from HK$23,424 in 2015.”
“‘Some developers hold a large number of new projects and unfinished units,’ said Derek Chan, head of research at Ricacorp Properties. ‘To remain liquid, some developers do not mind adopting a low-price sales strategy, hoping to achieve the effect of small profits but quick turnover.’”