A report from Candy‘s Dirt in Texas. “We regularly hear, ‘Why is there a cow skull in every house you show us, and what is it with the love of red paint?’ ‘Wow, you have a lot of outdated homes here!’ ‘The property we want does not exist yet in Dallas, so we’ll rent and wait on our home to be built.’”
“What I’m seeing is the ball getting dropped a lot lately. I think a certain degree of complacency has crept in — I get it. We’ve just come off of one of the headiest times in luxury real estate. There was a window of time over the past 18 months when you could put any outdated hot mess on the market and it would go to contract in a day. News flash: We are past that, folks. WAY past it. And we have been for a while.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer in Pennsylvania. “Some dream of a future for Philadelphia’s business district as a new neighborhood in the sky, with bedrooms where cubicles used to be. The reality could be darker, literally: a lot of the remaining towers are not ideally suited for housing, with vast amounts of space that have no access to natural light. In the heart of the office district north of Market Street and west of City Hall, downtown still feels ghostly.”
“‘If a building is 75-to-80 speed in depth you end up with a weird no man’s land,’ said Michael McCloskey, principal at the architecture firm Bernardon. ‘If it’s five or 10 feet [of extra space], you can fill it with residence storage or something. But if it’s 120 feet deep, what do we do with all this windowless internal space?’”
The Chicago Sun Times in Illinois. “Local stores and restaurants still suffer, though, for a mash-up of reasons that include the pandemic, crime and digital commerce. Mari Gallagher, a market researcher, said the survivors will be those who best deal with supply chain disruptions and adapt to online ordering. The South Side, in particular, has a glut of abandoned, unattractive storefronts that need to be redeveloped or to draw some other use, such as a day care center, Gallagher said.”
The Dayton Daily News in Ohio. “Glass crunched under Lynn Lamance’s shoes as she navigated the heaping, growing piles of garbage behind an empty apartment building in Dayton’s Santa Clara district. There were at least six mattresses, four couches, three armchairs, car tires, toys and clothes, mixed with trash bags full of household waste piled high in an alley off Santa Clara Avenue. ‘I hope there’s no dead bodies up here anywhere,’ half-joked Victoria McNeal, president of the neighborhood association of nearby Riverdale as she stood in the alley.”
From WPTV. “One of the big questions looming as we head into the new year is whether the Florida housing market will cool off at all. Helen Powers decided during the pandemic to leave New York City behind. ‘I lived in Manhattan, and it was dangerous, dirty and a little depressing. It also seemed, in the middle of the pandemic like the apocalypse. It was very frightening,’ she said.”
The Marin Independent Journal in California. “Marin was among the Bay Area counties with the largest outward migration after the start of the pandemic, according to a new report. Since the COVID-19 crisis began, the number of people who have left California has decreased by 38%. Not so in the Bay Area, which remained one of the few regions that has seen an uptick in residents relocating, according to the California Policy Lab, a research institute based at the University of California.”
“Marin ranked No. 4 in the region, with an exit rate of 24% in the first four months of 2020, outpacing Contra Costa and Sonoma counties — at 22.2 % and 20.9%, respectively. San Francisco tops the list of the most exited counties, at 37.9%. Cynthia Murray, chief executive of the North Bay Leadership Council, said the report’s significant finding is in ‘the steep drop in people choosing to locate to Marin, which exacerbates the residents choosing to move out of Marin.’”
The Sun on California. “Adele is splashing out £42million for Hollywood big-hitter Sylvester Stallone’s Beverly Hills mansion, it was reported. She apparently made the move after the Rambo and Rocky star, 75, almost halved his original asking price from £81million.”
From Better Dwelling in Canada. “Canadian subprime real estate buyers are scrambling to join the housing gold rush. All but three major cities in Canada saw their share of poor quality credit home buyers rise. The share is relatively low compared to historic trends, but the climb is one of the sharpest in history.”
From Stuff New Zealand. “Data from the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (REINZ) shows a 7.4 per cent decrease in Auckland central city’s median rent since October 2019. The median sales price of Auckland central city flats dropped 16.5 per cent and faced a 17.4 per cent decrease in sales count over the past year, according to REINZ.”
“Chamanthie Sinhalage-Fonseka moved to Auckland last year with her husband. In her words, through ‘a quirk of Covid’ and many vacant apartments, they were able to rent a much better central-city flat than the one they had in Wellington for a similar price. They even knocked $100 off their weekly rent in September this year, she said, when prices had fallen further across the city centre.”
From Bloomberg. “Chinese developer shares dropped following local media reports that China Evergrande Group has been ordered to tear down apartment blocks in a development in Hainan province. Evergrande halted trading in its shares. Shares in Shimao Group Holdings dropped 5.9% to the lowest since March 2009 after the property company missed its targets. ‘Risks to Shimao’s liquidity could extend into 2022 as a parade of unfavorable media headlines threatens to keep potential buyers at a distance,’ Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Kristy Hung wrote in a note on Monday.”
“Evergrande records a 99% decline in sales year on year, the steepest among 31 listed developers tracked by Citigroup analysts. China’s property developers have mounting bills to pay in January and shrinking options to raise necessary funds. The industry will need to find at least $197 billion to cover maturing bonds, coupons, trust products and deferred wages to millions of migrant workers, according to Bloomberg calculations and analyst estimates. Beijing has urged builders like China Evergrande Group to meet payrolls by month-end in order to avoid the risk of social unrest.”