A report from the Scottsdale Progress in Arizona. “August brought dog days to the Scottsdale housing market. Pending sales plummeted year-over-year by 37.4% and new listings edged down 4.4% in the same time period, according to Phoenix Realtors. ‘At the end of the month, housing inventory was up 49.8% compared to last year, with enough homes for nearly four months’ worth of sales activity,’ it said of the Valley-wide inventory. Phoenix Realtors said, ‘Closed sales have topped 40,000 so far in 2024, less than but close to the average of the past few years. August’s pending sales, on the other hand, are the lowest since December 2007.’”
Mountain Xpress in North Carolina. “Asheville region home sales declined in August, falling 2 percent compared to last August, with 935 homes sold. Listing activity has risen for the past twelve months and has increased inventory in August by 40.1 percent, to nearly 3,350 homes for sale and four months of supply. Canopy MLS data at report time showed a 26.8 percent year-over-year increase in new construction throughout the 13 counties, equating to 483 additional new construction homes added to the market. ‘At four months of supply, our housing market is moving towards a more balanced position, and in the direction of a buyer’s market,’ said Caleb Phillips, a Canopy MLS Board of Director and Realtor®/broker with Lusso Realty. The September rate cut should bring more sellers to the market, who have been reluctant to sell due to the ‘lock-in’ effect of their lower rate. Burke County experienced decreases in all pricing metrics except for the average list price which increased 12.0 percent to $361,996. The percent of original list price received fell to 92.9 percent this month. The median sales price declined by 20.3 percent to $250,000.”
WFLA Tampa. “Massive rains from powerful Hurricane Helene left people stranded, without shelter and awaiting rescue Saturday. ‘I’ve never seen so many people homeless as what I have right now,’ said Janalea England, of Steinhatchee, Florida, a small river town along the state’s rural Big Bend, as she turned her commercial fish market into a storm donation site for friends and neighbors, many of whom couldn’t get insurance on their homes. Taylor County is in Florida’s Big Bend, went years without taking a direct hit from a hurricane. But after Idalia and two other storms in a little over a year, the area is beginning to feel like a hurricane superhighway.”
CBS News on Florida. “Residents at Springbrook Gardens in Fort Lauderdale were forced to evacuate their condo building after it was deemed unsafe. They loaded furniture into their vehicles on Friday. Saltwater has taken its toll on the building that is more than 70 years old. ‘It hasn’t hit me yet,’ Warren Sackler, who has lived in the building since 2007, said. The cost to fix the foundation could top a million dollars, and that worries Sackler. ‘That’s just the start,’ Sackler said. ‘We need a new roof so there’s no end.””
Clarksville Now in Tennessee. “On Memorial Day, Candace Payne woke up to find her basement filled with murky water. ‘I walked down the first set of stairs, and as soon as you turn to go down the second set, you see nothing but water,’ Payne said. After already investing $110,000 into renovating the house on Elberta Drive before the flood, it would now cost Payne an additional $186,000 to make repairs, including excavation around her property and foundation. It was once her dream home, but Payne is now asking the city to condemn the house, bulldoze it, and stop anyone else from ever building there again. ‘It’s only going to get worse; it’s going to continue happening, it’s going to be more devastating,’ she said. ‘On top of that, who can afford to stay in their home and keep repairing it when they know it’s going to flood? Flooding was never disclosed to me, and I recently discovered my house has flooded several times in the last 20 years,’ Payne told Clarksville Now.”
“Payne said when she bought the house, the previous owners offered the property without a Residential Property Condition Statement because they didn’t live in the house for the three years prior to the sale. Payne said she didn’t realize this wasn’t included in the housing contract until after the flooding took place. For now, she said, she’s stuck there with no way of leaving.”
The Maine Monitor. “Frustrated with used needles littering city streets, some local officials have called for renewed restrictions on syringe service programs, which they say contribute to the recent rise in needle waste. But harm reduction experts say the needle waste — and high rates of infectious disease among injection drug users in Maine — is evidence that these programs should be expanded, not restricted. Portland’s two programs distributed nearly 1.4 million syringes last year. At a March 2021 health and human services committee workshop, Marie L. Gray wrote, ‘As a longtime resident of the Parkside neighborhood and an avid walker, the issue of randomly discarded needles is a major concern. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to take a walk through the neighborhood and not see several discarded needles.’ At a West End Neighborhood Association meeting earlier this month, Rich Bianculli, echoing complaints from other residents, said the situation is, ‘kind of a nightmare,’ the Press Herald reported.”
ABC 7 in California. “Questions are being raised about a homeless housing project in the San Fernando Valley. According to one neighbor, the motel is closed and blocked off, with many homeless individuals living around the fenced area. She’s concerned about the volume of homelessness and drug activity in the area, wondering when the transition will begin. Fran Potaski said homeless encampments have taken over two vacant lots on a corner near her home. ‘This is unacceptable. It’s not safe for the residents. It’s not safe for anybody,’ she said. ‘I saw a guy smoking a pipe the other day, lighting up right there on the sidewalk, I went, ‘Oh my God. I’ve had enough of this. It’s ridiculous.’”
The San Francisco Chronicle in California. “For more than three years Mayor London Breed has been trying to attract developers willing to bet on the conversion of vacant office buildings into housing, a key part of her plan to revive downtown San Francisco. So far the pay off for all the effort has been stingy — just two significant conversion project applications totaling 164 units have been submitted. Construction hasn’t started on either. Veteran developer and broker Chris Foley said he is still not sold on the notion that conversions will play a significant role in the comeback of downtown San Francisco. ‘At the end of the day it costs the same amount of money to do a conversion as it does to build new,’ he said. ‘It’s great (Breed) is cutting the fees, but it’s not going to move the needle.’”
The Baltimore Sun in Maryland. “Chasen Cos., a builder of apartment projects in Fells Point, Mount Vernon, Federal Hill and downtown, is facing foreclosure on a historic office tower it planned to convert to housing. The Baltimore-based developer planned to transform One Calvert Plaza, one of the city’s oldest office buildings, into about 165 apartments with ground-level retail and office space on the second floor. Lender Sandy Spring Bank filed last week to foreclose on the 16-story, Beaux Arts-style building at East Baltimore and North Calvert streets. Court documents show Chasen defaulted on a $33.7 million loan that the bank approved in March 2022 and owed $28.9 million in principal, interest, late fees and attorneys’ fees as of Sept. 7.”
“Court records show Chasen’s financial troubles apparently stretch beyond the foreclosure, with contractors in recent weeks demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars in allegedly unpaid bills. Chasen is listed as a defendant in at least 10 cases filed this year, most since June, and several this month. Most have been filed by subcontractors or service providers seeking payment. Nottingham-based Pinpoint Plumbing said Chasen owes it more than $48,000 for a $432,000 job it was hired for in August 2022 and has since completed. The contractor said in an August complaint that it installed new construction plumbing and gas piping at at The Brixton, an apartment project at 421 South Broadway in Fells Point. ‘Despite repeated demand, Chasen refused to pay, and did not pay, the remaining balance owed’ under an agreement for services, Pinpoint’s complaint says.”
The Globe and Mail in Canada. “In an act of desperation, Metro Vancouver’s development community has embarked on a letter-writing campaign calling on the regional government to reconsider major fee hikes on new residential development. The builders say that increased government fees for new home infrastructure, amid a bleak housing market, are in many cases making the delivery of new housing impossible. It’s already been well publicized that dozens of projects have gone into foreclosure or stalled, and developers with big enough pockets are not moving forward with their projects. This isn’t a case of developer greed, Wesgroup president Beau Jarvis said, although he’s aware that the public might interpret it that way. ‘It’s an untenable operating environment,’ he said in an interview. ‘Our industry is broken.’”
Guelph Mercury Tribune in Canada. “Wellington County Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) are looking for information about fires early on Friday morning in Erin. Police said two separate fires, which were deemed suspicious, were reported in a new housing development on Sept. 27. At approximately 12:54 a.m., members of the OPP and fire crews from the Erin Fire Department rushed to the structure fires on Brown Street. OPP said that eight houses sustained damage in the fires, with some of them being ‘completely destroyed.’ Police are asking the public to review video surveillance and dash cam footage if they were in the area at the time of the fires.”
The Spinoff. “In TVNZ’s new series AA Insurance Location Location Location New Zealand, two familiar faces step up as our own Kirstie and Phil: Jayne Kiely and Paul Glover. You might remember Kiely from her TV presenting roles in the 2000s, or recognise actor Glover from shows like Educators and 800 Words. Now, they’re real estate agents ready to help New Zealand house hunters find a home. ‘I’m your fairy godmother, dressed in a blue suit,’ Glover jokes when he meets first home buyers Adam and Jesz.”
“Adam and Jesz need more than a fairy godmother in their search for a home on Auckland’s popular North Shore. Despite a budget of (Dr Evil voice) one million dollars, they’re exhausted from three years of open homes and auctions. ‘We’re a bit deluded, thinking maybe we can afford that, and finding out we’re nowhere near,’ Jesz says. ‘I’m not going to lie, we’re up against it,’ Glover warns them. LLL slides across some of the challenges in today’s market. It also informs us that house prices have fallen since their peak in 2021, and that we’re now in a ‘buyers’ market.’”
“But what LLL NZ does – perhaps unwittingly – is reflect how hard it is for today’s first home buyers to compete in a system that isn’t built for them, where one million Auckland dollars doesn’t buy you a million dollar view, let alone a house that isn’t plonked on top of a busy highway. At least Adam and Jesz get their happy ending. They fall in love with the third property Glover shows them and secure it at auction for $50,000 over their million dollar budget. Their relief and joy is a reminder of everything home ownership represents: security, safety, a place to put down roots forever. This happy ending should have made LLL NZ feel as warm and comforting as the UK version, but somehow, it didn’t. Like being shown a $1.6 million dollar house with half a garage, it just felt a bit bleak. This Stuff piece from 2022 states that in the mid-1990s, the average New Zealand home cost $125,440, which was 3.2 times the average household income of $39,796. In 2022, the average house cost $977,158, 8.2 times the average household’s income.”
ABC News in Australia. “When Marnie Robertson stumped up $140,000 for a ‘house and land package’ in the Coolah Caravan Park, she thought she was buying into a grey nomad Utopia. Yet her dream house is literally falling apart around her. Back in 2017, an engineer deemed the house ‘not suitable for occupation’ and noted more than 100 defects. Camped out in Marnie’s backyard, Janet unveiled her vision: a ‘home base’ for grey nomads to return to when had they tired of life on the road. This Utopia would be based at the Coolah Caravan Park, which Janet bought with her partner, Graeme Booker, a small business owner. In the early months, Marnie says life in the park was ‘very enjoyable.’ ‘We used to have a happy hour down in front of the camp kitchen every night.’”
“Before long, the party was over. The residents started to ask questions, wanting to know where their weekly site fees were going. They’d bought into a company title arrangement, making them shareholders in the company that owned the park. And they wanted to see the books. Marnie’s neighbour, Geoff McMillan, got a lawyer on the case. Stonewalled, the residents eventually applied to the Supreme Court to inspect the books. ‘After two days, the judge says, ‘Stop. This is all a waste of time. There are no books for you to inspect,’ Geoff recalls.”
“The residents had together put more than a million dollars into the company for their ‘house and land packages.’ Yet one of the profit and loss statements they received was simply blank. And their weekly site fees, it turns out, were being transferred to another company controlled by Graeme and Janet. ‘We were gobsmacked,’ Geoff says. Next, it was announced the park would be sold. Marnie and Geoff didn’t understand: The company constitution said the park couldn’t be sold without 80 per cent of shareholders agreeing. That had been part of the sales pitch: ‘The dream is to be debt-free in your own home … without the risk that someone else can sell it out from under you.’”
“But now, the administrators were in charge. And they were, in fact, selling the park from underneath them. The buyer would once again be Janet and Graeme — only this time, without the shareholders. With the park settlement looming, Geoff’s neighbour, Jimmy, came home to a letter saying he had no entitlement to continue living on his plot. He had to sign a new agreement to pay Janet and Graeme’s other company triple his current site fees or leave. ‘I’ve put my life savings into this place and I thought I’d find bailiffs and all sorts at home,’ he said. This cabin was Jimmy’s first home. He’d previously been living in a bus while waiting 16 years for social housing.”
“The court’s position was that despite buying what was called a ‘house and land package,’ the residents had not bought any land title. They’d bought a share in a company that owned the land, and once it no longer owned that land, the residents had no entitlement to it. ‘I was told the land was mine. But it’s not mine,’ Jimmy says. An ex-sailor and circus promoter, Jimmy describes himself as largely illiterate. To him, court was a bewildering place. At one point, he was scolded by the judge: ‘Mr James, don’t call me mate!’ Jimmy shakes his head at the memory: ‘That went down like a turd in a punch bowl.’ But the verdict didn’t go their way. The Supreme Court dismissed the claims against Janet and Graeme: unconscionable conduct, harassment and coercion, and misleading and deceptive conduct.”
“The High Court will decide whether it will hear the appeal in the coming weeks. If unsuccessful, the residents will be facing enormous court costs from their losses so far. ‘We’ll be bankrupt, as far as I understand,’ Jimmy says. ‘They’ll take my house and car and everything.’ This week, he got a taste of what’s to come. When his card was declined, he discovered $5,000 had been debited from his account on court order.”