A report from Go Banking Rates. “‘Buyer’s remorse and cancellations shortly after contract are increasing. Builders state buyers are nervous about a potential recession, struggling to get comfortable with higher payments, or expecting home prices to decline,’ Jody Kahn, senior vice president with JBREC, told CNBC, adding that in her mid-June survey she continued to see cancellations on the rise.”
From Market Watch. “Texas saw the highest rate of cancelations (when buyers terminate a contract for a new home), followed by the broader Southwest, and Northern California.A quarter of home builders are reducing their prices, according to the John Burns Real Estate Consulting survey. ‘Scary times,’ a home builder in Nashville, Tenn. told the company. ‘Hoard cash and hang on for the ride!’ ‘Someone turned out the lights on our sales in June!’ one builder in Atlanta, Ga. told the company. ‘Sales have fallen off a cliff,’ an Austin, Texas builder said. ‘We’re selling 1/3 of what we sold in March and April.’ A Boise, Idaho builder said that builders are slashing new home prices by 15% to 20%.”
From KOIN in Oregon. “‘You can only burn white-hot for so long,’ explained Drew Coleman, founder of Opt Real Estate in Portland. In June, the average home sale price in the Portland metro area was $633,300 compared to $649,600 in May.”
From Bisnow New York. “The number of signed contracts for condo sales in New York City has been falling since April, according to the latest report from Douglas Elliman. New condo contracts signed in Manhattan last month fell by 29% compared to the previous June. ‘What we’ve seen drop off is the buyer that was stretching themselves to begin with, who were only able to buy because interest rates were beyond historic lows. I think that that buyer has been weeded out of the marketplace for now,’ Brown Harris Stevens Development Marketing President Stephen Kliegerman told Bisnow.”
From Mansion Global. “Higher mortgage rates are causing some buyers to pull the plug on their deals. ‘When mortgage rates shot up to almost 6% in June, we saw a number of buyers back out of deals,’ said Lindsay Garcia, a Redfin real estate agent in Miami. ‘Some had to bow out because they could no longer get a loan due to the jump in rates.’”
The Kitsap Sun. “The median residential home price in Kitsap County jumped from $550,000 to $600,000 in June, a record-high price for homebuyers who are increasingly finding it difficult to afford a home, according to Northwest Multiple Listing Service. Meanwhile, median home prices in Washington state dropped slightly from $660,000 to $650,000. Active listings rose from 288 listings in May to 606 listings in June, an inventory increase of 110%. Ultimately, Frank Wilson, Kitsap regional manager at John L. Scott Real Estate summarized Kitsap’s new housing market this way: ‘More houses on the market, longer market times, stabilizing home prices, fewer showings and open house visitors, fewer offers at one time, and more adjustments.’”
From KXAN on Texas. “The president-elect of the Austin Board of Realtors said she expects ‘a little bit of a decrease’ when it comes to future Austin home prices as the previously red-hot housing market begins to show some signs of cooling off. ABOR President-Elect Ashley Jackson said she doesn’t expect the price drop to be significant and stressed that the market’s fundamentals remain strong. ‘No, we are not in a housing bubble. There are indicators that things are flattening out. The market is slowing down a little bit. It’s kind of taking the edge off of the fever pitch that we’ve been in for the past few years. But we are not in a bubble…Now, conversely, we have high inventory, and we’ve got a good selection of homes, more like 2019 numbers, pre-pandemic numbers. So buyers will have a few more options out there. Instead of one house being for sale in neighborhood, you may find two to five houses for sale in neighborhoods. We’re just kind of taking the edge off of what was a wild market for the past few years.’”
The Bay Area Newsgroup in California. “After two years of soaring home prices, the Bay Area housing market may have entered a cooling phase as rising mortgage rates put a squeeze on buyers. But that doesn’t mean home values are suddenly falling back to Earth. Far from it. Even so, housing experts say the breakneck pace of year-over-year price growth appears to have peaked – though few are predicting a housing crash on the horizon. ‘We’re just seeing more of a normalizing to pre-pandemic conditions,’ said Selma Hepp, CoreLogic deputy chief economist. ‘It wasn’t sustainable.With fewer buyers out there, what we’re starting to see is more price reductions and more homes staying on the market longer.’”
“Ramesh Rao, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker Realty in the South Bay, said over the past few months he’s seen homes regularly going for under the asking price. That was unthinkable over much of the past two years as house hunters. ‘My advice to all clients if they’re sellers is: Today is better than tomorrow,’ he said.”
“Despite the recent price increases, Janine Hunt with Red Oak Realty in the East Bay said her local market is beginning to experience a ‘needed correction.’ In the Berkeley and Oakland area, more properties are coming online and staying for sale longer, she said, and the buyers that remain can afford to take their time looking for the right home and sometimes expect asking prices to come down.”
From WRAL in North Carolina. “Adwerks is the latest company that serves the real estate market to lay off workers, as the company confirmed it has laid off about 40 employees to WRAL TechWire. This decision from Durham-headquartered Adwerx follows announcements of layoffs at two mortgage companies with locations in Charlotte earlier this year. The layoffs are coming as the company had scaled up in some ‘non-core initiatives,’ said Dan London, the company’s head of marketing. The company is now unwinding those areas outside of real estate that just didn’t pan out as well as the company had hoped,’ London told WRAL TechWire.”
From 12 News. “Higher interest rates are causing Arizona’s housing market to tap the breaks. That’s having all kinds of ripple effects among buyers and sellers. A real estate agent with 20 years of experience selling homes in the Valley says we’re ‘in an adjustment period.’ ‘Everyone is pulling back a little bit,’ said Kelly Hall. ‘Can people afford it with the increase in interest rates? That’s the question they will have to be honest with.’”
“In the last couple of years there was an average of 3,500-4,500 homes on the market in the Valley in a given time period, said Kelly Schmidt, Executive Sales Agent with the Jason Mitchell Group in Scottsdale. That number is now around 17,000, quadruple the amount. ‘I have a friend who has a listing he put up in Peoria that hasn’t gotten a peep in one week, which six months ago was unheard of,’ said Schmidt. ‘I’m able to negotiate deals now. Before we were waiving repairs, waiving inspections. We were doing all these ridiculous things.’”
The Globe and Mail in Canada. “When Tara Rudd and her husband bought a cottage with a view of Ontario’s Lake Couchiching in January, they planned to quickly renovate the home and flip it in the spring. But when they put the updated house on the market in May, they received just one offer, which turned out to be a bust. In no rush to sell, the pair switched gears two weeks ago and entered a market that, despite recent economic jitters, has barely cooled, if it has at all: vacation rentals in cottage country.”
“A year ago, Ms. Rudd and her husband would have had no problem selling the one-storey, open-concept cottage. With closed international borders limiting options for vacationers and many urban dwellers working from home, buyers flooded cottage country during the first two years of the pandemic. As sales jumped, so did prices. Real estate agent Alexis Victor said one property on the Severn River attracted 78 offers. But as the Bank of Canada began to raise interest rates this spring, Ms. Victor said, ‘the tap turned off.’”
From News.com.au in Australia. “A prominent real estate industry coach says he is ‘really stressed’ after ‘almost no buyers’ showed up to his auctions over the weekend in the wake of the Reserve Bank’s third interest rate hike in three months. Auctioneer Tom Panos has called on the RBA to consider the impact of its aggressive rate hikes on the real estate market, which continued to fall last month led by declines in Sydney and Melbourne.”
“‘There have been 20 per cent drops in three months in certain parts,’ he said. ‘For instance the Central Coast is one of those. So again, all I’ve got to say to you is – the Reserve Bank please keep your eyes out on real estate. It is having an impact. There is no question about it. It’s concerning buyers, we have vendors who have significantly reduced what they were hoping to get.’”
“He added that there was a subset of buyers who purchased between late 2019 and the end of 2021 who ‘now have assets that are now significantly worth less than what they paid for.’ ‘Now of course that’s not a problem if you’re a normal property person that’s playing the long game and not a bitcoin in-and-out type person trying to time the market,’ Mr Panos said. ‘But my friends, all I’ve got to say to you is right now, if you are a vendor and you are thinking of selling your asset, you’ve got to be a very brave person to hold off not putting it on now. You want to be putting it on in the next week or two. I don’t want to see you putting it on in September, October, November.’”
“‘Sell it now. Get on the phone, get on the front foot, nine o’clock Monday morning ring an agent, say tell me what can you get for my property right now and what do you think the property’s going to be worth in three months time,’ he said.”
“The sharpest declines were seen in Nobby in Queensland‘s Darling Downs region, where prices fell more than 24 per cent over three months. That was followed by Mulgoa in NSW’s Blue Mountains, down nearly 23 per cent, and several ACT suburbs – Griffith, Giralang, Hawker, Farrer, Lyneham and Red Hill – all down more than 20 per cent. NSW Central Coast suburbs West Gosford and The Entrance North were down around 20 per cent. Other hard-hit areas included Allansford in Victoria, Dandenong South in Melbourne and Larrakeyah in Darwin.”