A report from KBTX in Texas. “Sales are booming in the Brazos Valley. Laura Walker’s been in the market since mid-May looking at homes for her parents. They’re retired and looking to move from North Carolina. ‘I kind of had to re-evaluate my baseline and what I thought things were worth,’ Walker said. ‘Everything I was looking at I thought, ‘This is overpriced. This is overpriced.’ But then I realized if everything is that price, not overpriced, so I had to realign my brain and get my thinking in order.’”
The Charlotte Business Journal in North Carolina. “The Charlotte region’s frenzied housing demand is redefining the million-dollar market here. ‘A million dollars is what $500,000 was three years ago,’ says Libby Gonyea, an agent with Helen Adams Realty. ‘I feel like Charlotte has become a big-boy city. A million doesn’t get you a ton anymore, and sadly that’s a relatively affordable price range, especially close in town.’”
The Advocate in Louisiana. “Some local Realtors said they see signs the market is cooling off. ‘I’m noticing it slowing down a little bit,’ said Scott Saporito, president of the Greater Baton Rouge Association of Realtor’s board of directors. ‘It seems to make sense to me. With an all-time historically low number of listings, it’s hard to keep that amount of sales up.’”
“The rising prices are leading to some issues with appraisals, said Ashley LaBorde Vuci with Latter & Blum. People are making offers on homes that are well above the appraised value and lenders are shooting the deals down. That’s causing Realtors to have to do more work to help get the value of the home back up.”
The New York Post. “A federal moratorium on evictions is set to expire on Saturday but New Yorkers who owe back rent have breathing room for at least another month — infuriating landlords who are collectively holding billions of dollars worth of IOUs. Landlord Clarence Hamer, who owns a two-family rowhouse in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, said he’s owed $67,000 in back rent by a tenant who hasn’t paid anything since August 2019 — and he hasn’t been able to press his case in Housing Court due to the pandemic.”
“Olga Someras, general counsel of the pro-landlord Rent Stabilization Association, predicted that the housing courts would be overwhelmed by ‘the sheer volume of cases’ once the moratorium ends. ‘I think what you will see is a lot of people going into foreclosure, being forced to sell to cash buyers or people able to take advantage of landlords who can’t wait anymore for the court to allow their case to proceed,’ she said.”
From 9 News. “‘In Colorado approximately 180,000 people live in households that are behind on the rent,’ said Executive Director, COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project, Zach Neumann. Balances some landlords don’t believe will ever be paid. ‘It’s like watching the meter at the gas pump go around. The money that you are putting out. And it’s like this is coming out of pocket. I may have to sell this home at foreclosure because I now can’t afford to keep it,’ said landlord Ann Janitell.”
The Daily Mail on California. “A group of about 40 housing and homeless advocates marched to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco mansion on Saturday to hang an ‘eviction notice’ on her door, demanding she reconvene Congress to pass legislation extending the eviction moratorium. The moratorium expired at midnight on Saturday, and the House Speaker was unable to garner enough support to pass a resolution extending it before Congress adjourned for summer break.”
“She has instead demanded that the Centers for Disease Control, which initially started the moratorium extend it, despite a Supreme Court ruling requiring Congressional authorization. This wasn’t the first time protesters came to Pelosi’s San Francisco mansion – in January, her home was vandalized with a pig’s head surrounded in a pool of red paint, with her garage door defaced with graffiti reading: ‘$2k cancel RENT! We want everything,’ an apparent reference to the stimulus check negotiations at the time.”
The Santa Barbara News Press in California. “Residents, who would never have advertised that they were Republicans by flying the flag in this Democrat stronghold for fear of being canceled by left-wing sympathizers, are now flying American flags year-round. One neighbor went and bought a bigger flag. ‘If you haven’t been canceled here, you haven’t lived,’ she recently told me.”
“Perhaps these flag-flying Democrats also imagine that if the supporters of the June 2020 BLM protest try a repeat performance this summer, they could even march up APS, into our neighborhood, demanding we turn over our houses to them as reparations. The mob would care less that most of the neighborhood leans left. It’s too far for the mob to reach the estates on the other side of Montecito. Perhaps all Americans should be flying their flags year-round until this socialist, communist madness stops.”
From Mansion Global on Canada. “Shattering records for British Columbia’s Lower Mainland region, a 22,000-square-foot Vancouver mansion sold earlier this month for C$42 million (US$33.35 million), Sotheby’s International Realty Canada has confirmed. Known as the Belmont Estate, the home hit the market last year for C$58 million. ‘Before Covid, the majority of interest in this property was from international buyers,’ said Christa Frosch, the Sotheby’s realtor who handled the sale. ‘But because they were unable to travel, and because it became difficult for some of them to move money to Canada, we had a domestic buyer. Our market has taken a huge adjustment because of international people not bringing money to Canada.’”
The Vancouver Sun in Canada. “One of the more shocking examples was the University of B.C. ‘student’ who bought a $31-million house a few years ago in Vancouver. There were also the nine different international students who snagged $57 million in mortgage money from Canadian banks to buy posh dwellings across Metro Vancouver. This is not to mention the countless other proxies who somehow obtained gigantic mortgages from Canadian banks without having to provide evidence they earned an actual income.”
“How can this happen even as ordinary Canadians find it a challenge to prove to banks they earn enough to secure a mortgage? Understanding how people serve as proxies for the real (or beneficial) owners of properties is a key to unravelling why Canadian house prices have spun out of control. At least two questions stand out about this inflationary phenomenon. Are such proxies still able to get whopping mortgages from Canadian banks? And what have been the long-lasting real-estate repercussions of this practice, especially for sought-after markets like Vancouver and Toronto?”
“In evidence before the Cullen Commission into money laundering in B.C., a UBC geography professor emeritus laid out how offshore capital has streamed into Canadian real estate. Up to 2016 ‘banks in Vancouver were giving preferential loan terms to foreign home-purchasers without full disclosure, effectively practising deregulation for non-Canadian clients,’ said author David Ley.”
“Stephen Punwasi, a Toronto-based real estate analyst, has also shown how Canadian banks were eager to give loans to foreign students with no jobs. He even published a photo of a bank branch poster, complete with a dragon-like Pokeman figure, telling international students to sign up for mortgages with ‘no income verification!’”
“North Vancouver-raised Ron Butler, who now heads one of Canada’s largest independent mortgage brokerages, says Metro Vancouver has ‘shown the ost insanity in the mortgage business.’ Another widely used technique for pumping huge amounts of speculative money into Canadian housing, Butler said, is by putting down payments on five to 10 presale condo units at the same time, typically in towers that are five years away from being constructed. The trick, the broker said, is to sell the condos to someone else by so-called ‘assignment’ just before a mortgage is required. By then the speculator, offshore or domestic, has already made a handy profit in Canada’s growing market. ‘I could spin this stuff all day,’ Butler said, explaining the numerous ways global capital has skewed housing affordability.”
From Good Returns New Zealand. “Following a surge in house price growth in recent months, more home loan applications are falling into banks’ ‘high value’ category, requiring a valuation. Cities outside of Auckland are seeing more homes than ever included in the ‘high value’ category. Homes in Tauranga are increasingly passing the $1 million mark, forcing buyers to get hold of a valuation before their loans can be rubber stamped.”
“The need for valuations is causing headaches for clients, with most vendors opting for auctions in a sellers’ market. Buyers are struggling to get the valuations they need on time in order to go unconditional with their offers. A host of mortgage brokers say valuation issues have become even more testing in recent weeks. Joel Oliver of SuperCity Mortgages said e-valuations were taking time to catch up to the market, and said banks had outdated luxury property price caps. He said, ‘$2 million in Auckland is no longer luxury.’”
From Bloomberg. “After a years-long campaign to tame property prices, China is upping the ante to break a stubborn cycle of gains that’s made homes increasingly unaffordable. In recent days, China jacked up mortgage rates in a major city, vowed to accelerate the development of government subsidized rental housing, and moved to increase scrutiny on everything from financing of developers and newly-listed home prices to title transfers. While China has spent years trying to cool property prices, analysts say this round of crackdowns will be different. One clear signal came in Vice Premier Han’s comments on steering away from using real estate to provide short-term boosts for the economy.”
“‘In the past, Beijing has consistently used the property sector to stabilize overall growth,’ Nomura analysts led by Lu Ting wrote in a research note, adding that they expect Beijing to change its playbook. Policy makers won’t lift property restrictions this time partly due to concerns about a systemic financial crisis, the analysts wrote.”
“Another signal came from the unusually large number of government entities that vowed recently to strengthen measures on everything from project development and home sales, to rental and property management services. Eight policy bodies said in a joint statement that they would step up penalties for misconduct. In the line of fire will be developers that default on debt repayments, delay deliveries on pre-sold homes or elicit negative news or market concerns.”
“All signs point to the government’s determination to ensure social stability, even if it spells near-term turmoil for capital markets. Just in June, Guo Shuqing, chairman of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, warned against betting that property prices will never fall. ‘Property is the single most important source of financial risks and wealth inequality in China,’ said Larry Hu, head of China economics at Macquarie Securities Ltd.”
From News.com.au in Australia. “Brittney Rigby has been saving for more than 10 years to become a homeowner, but as the Sydney resident watched property prices skyrocketing she wondered if it was ever going to become a reality. ‘This is the biggest purchase you are ever going to make, so it feels incredibly important to make the right decision. Obviously when you are looking at properties and you think it’s within the price range and it’s actually not and the market is willing to pay much more above what the real estate agent is saying or the valuations online are saying, it has felt really disheartening,’ she told news.com.au.”
“With their budget stretched to $950,000 and most places in Parramatta, where they were looking, going above the $1 million mark, the couple had started to think they had been priced out of the market and were on the verge of giving up. A few months ago the couple managed to snag a three-bedroom, two-bathroom property in North Parramatta. Ms Rigby said they simply got ‘lucky’ and are still in disbelief they got it. They can’t move in until November when an existing tenancy ends.”
“She admits, however, that transferring over 10 years of savings was hard. ‘It’s interesting because you know that money is growing towards this one big massive goal, which is the most expensive purchase you will ever make, and it’s hard to imagine that it’s only 5 per cent or 10 per cent of that entire amount,’ she said. ‘The toughest part was transferring money out and psychologically reconciling that it’s a good thing, versus [the fact that] all the money I had saved over a decade was gone.’”