It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “Buyers started returning to San Francisco’s downtown condo market in the fourth quarter of 2020. The resurgence in sales, however, didn’t bolster prices: They declined an average of 10.4% year over year to $1,056 per square foot, which Sandra Eaton, regional director West Coast at Compass Development Marketing Group said is the lowest they have been in the last five years.”

“A partner in HFZ Capital Partners’ Shore Club in South Beach filed a lawsuit against the hotel’s owners, as HFZ’s financial and legal troubles continue to mount. HFZ had originally planned to redevelop the historic 309-key hotel into a luxury condo development, but canceled plans for the project in 2017 as a result of the slow condo market.”

“A unique condo is up for sale in Jamaica Plain, but prospective buyers will need an open mind about its open concept. The main bathroom on the first floor at 302 South Street #2 does not have doors or walls around the toilet. The shower is enclosed, but in clear glass. According to the listing, the house went into foreclosure in late January.”

“As developers struggle to offload excess condo inventory in an oversaturated market, it is widely reported that investors and mezzanine lenders have swooped in with offers to buy units in bulk. Rutherford Place is an outlier among the projects involved in bulk deals, in that it is not one of the estimated 900 new or in-progress developments – mostly in Manhattan – that currently include the more than 15,000 unsold units across New York. The Real Deal notes that developers prefer to keep bulk sales like these quiet, lest they indicate distress to the rest of the market.”

“Pricing the property well above the averages will not only take longer to sell, it will also lead to deeper discounts after all, according to UrbanDigs, a New York real estate data provider. ‘We have been analyzing the market data and collecting information from agents over the years,’ John Walkup, co-founder of UrbanDigs continued. ‘They describe stale inventory as a vicious cycle, in which each price cut increases the chances of another price cut.’”

“Rent prices in Toronto have been plummeting during the pandemic, and a new report says Toronto neighbourhoods have seen the biggest drop in the country, with one neighbourhood’s rents falling as much as 29%. It was GTA’s neighbourhoods — largely dominated by Toronto — that led the country in the biggest year-over-year rent drops, securing every single one of the top 20 spots. The largest drops were seen in South Riverdale, where rent went down on average 29% to a new low of $2,002.”

“Today another of those fast-rising property magnates delivers the sector some very bad news. Tim Gurner drops a truth bomb at The Australian: The collapse in immigration and the flow of Chinese has trashed the market for 300-plus apartment skyscrapers. Salta Properties Sam Tarascio chimed to say he has masses of empty apartments with rents down 30-40%.”

“The growing appetite of people here to have housing property outside J&K attracted local property dealers and they too started expanding their real estate ventures outside the state, mostly in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. This combination of local property dealers and the local investors has become a convenient means of flight of capital from the state to other parts of the country. Initially, this looked prosperous for both. But over a period of time, the investment has lost sheen and many investors found their money locked in the troubled waters of the real estate sector in the country. Those who have invested in under-construction properties are the worst sufferers.”

“If a non-Londoner were to form an opinion of Nine Elms based only on carefully worded press releases and the area’s swish website , they would probably think it was the best thing to hit the city since the Night Tube. Nine Elms today feels something between a wannabe mini Dubai and a permanent building site. Cranes often outnumber real life pedestrians, because despite the strange Uncanny Valley images of Photoshopped Nine Elms residents gleefully walking the streets in various promotional photos, I’m not sure anyone actually lives here.”

“Expensive homes for the super rich, like a £15 million four-bedroom apartment in the 1 St. George Wharf tower overlooking the Thames, lay empty. This astoundingly expensive home in particular has been on the market since December 2019. This is no anomaly: several luxury flats with asking prices well into the millions have sat dormant since as early as 2018, and the construction of yet more identical million pound homes continues every day.”

“How much of a scandal could a company that rents desks really create? The rise and fall of WeWork was more of an amusingly bad business story than an example of dangerous fraud, but the new documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn asks if that’s all there was to it. The documentary explores ‘the rise and fall of one of the biggest corporate flameouts and venture capitalist bubbles in recent years – this is the story of WeWork and its hippie-messianic leader Adam Neumann who makes you beg the question, was he trying to create a cult?’”

“The trailer focuses on WeWork’s founder Adam Neumann and how he managed to convince everyone, including Japanese conglomerate SoftBank which invested $4 billion, that WeWork was going to change the world. His former employees are among the interviewees in the film, which also highlights how Neumann grew increasingly erratic over time, and how that all culminated in the infamous implosion of the company that ended in bankruptcy and suddenly shut-down offices.”

“As someone not familiar with the intricacies of the story, all the revelations in the trailer are new to me. The idea that Neumann cultivated an almost cult-like following and that mass expenditures and partying culture led to this extremely lucrative company going bankrupt overnight is all very fascinating. As is the beleaguered attitude of the talking heads, one of which exclaims in the trailer, ‘For God’s sake, they’re renting f—g desks.’”

“The WeWork documentary feels to me like something very much in the vein of Netflix and Hulu’s competing Fyre Fest documentaries — a look at the schadenfreude of start-ups so that regular people at us can laugh at rich people’s mistakes. Which I’m not complaining about.”