A report from WACH on South Carolina. “If you’re looking to buy or sell a house, it’s boom time. ‘Interest rates are at an all-time low. Banks are pretty much giving free money away. Buyers are seeing that and it doesn’t matter what monetary background you’re coming from whether you make $50,000 a year or $200,000 a year,’ said realtor Enoch Walters.”
The Gainesville Sun in Florida. “Developers also are noticing the hot housing trend. Subdivisions are springing up throughout the area, particularly in Flowery Branch, where houses are being built at a furious pace. ‘Right now is when you look to your friends and your family and … people in the grocery store and say, ‘Do you want to sell?’ said Beverly Filson, a Realtor with The Norton Agency in Gainesville.”
From WKRN on Tennessee. “The housing market madness continues. It’s fueled what you could call ‘buying frenzy,’ with multiple bidding wars and it’s forcing people to make decisions in a hurry, leading to buyers’ remorse. According to a Flyhomes survey, American homebuyers are still getting caught up in the current climate with one in four experiencing buyers’ remorse. Some surveyed didn’t approve of the price they paid, while others didn’t like the size and/or location.”
“‘The main thing we can do right now in any hot market is breathe,’ said Brian Copeland, President of Greater Nashville Realtors. ‘You do the best you can do with your finances. Write a letter; do what you have to do to set yourself apart, but at the end of the day it’s out of your control.’”
From Pallet Enterprise. “Boom, Boom, Boom! Millennials are hitting the housing market driving up demand at a time that inventory is at a low point. The housing market is enjoying a boom time, and home values are soaring, too. U.S. housing gained $2.5 trillion in value last year, according to Zillow, an Internet realtor service. That’s the biggest jump since 2005. Mortgage lenders made a record $4.4 trillion in home loans in 2020; the biggest lender, Quicken Loans, issued $1 billion of loans per day.”
“Think of it this way. The 2008 crisis forced Millennials to delay their acclimation into adulthood. It disrupted the normal flow of the next generation starting out in life. Many of them are not buying ‘starter’ homes, either; their first home is on the upper end of the market, price-wise. ‘Millennials are finally coming out of the gate,’ reported luxury realtor Sotheby’s. ‘It’s not uncommon for their first purchase to be a multimillion-dollar luxury home.’”
From KTVN on Nevada. “Housing prices in the Reno-Sparks area remain at near-record highs. The market is still flooded with out-of-town buyers. ‘California is number one, Bay Area buyers with their cash,’ said Kayla Dalton, a Realtor with Dickson Realty. These bidding wars mean that the cancellation rate is also very high right now. ‘The cancellation rate is so high because these buyers are throwing out these ridiculous offers just to land something, and then they’re reviewing what their finances are, they’re reviewing the payment structure, and they’re getting uncomfortable,’ Dalton said. ‘So then they’re canceling transactions.’”
From Socket Site in California. “With the number of single-family homes and condos that were newly listed for sale in San Francisco over the past week having outpaced the number of new purchase contracts that were written, the number of homes on the market across the city ticked up a (1) percent to 940. That’s 140 percent more inventory than there was on the market at the same time last year. But that’s also the most end-of-March inventory on the market in San Francisco since 2011 and 130 percent more inventory on the market than there was at this time of the year in 2015.”
“The average list price per square foot of said homes ticked down nearly 3 percent to around $950 per square foot, which is 2 percent lower than at the same time last year (and over 8 percent below the average list price per square foot of the homes which remain on the market, 20 percent of which have been reduced at least once).”
From Portland Monthly in Oregon. “This past fall, after more than a decade of condominium living in Portland’s Pearl District, Jill McAlpine’s bid on a house near Washington Park was accepted. But she didn’t put her condo, where she’d lived for more than a decade, on the market. Knowing the condo market had been sluggish lately, with inventory priced to sell, she put it up for rent instead. ‘It doesn’t feel like a good business decision right now,’ she says of selling.”
“Condo market sales, particularly in areas like downtown and the Pearl, had a slowdown in 2019. But over the past year, with inventory in all categories tight across the board in Portland, condo sales might be picking up a bit—just at price levels not seen since the mid 20-teens. ‘There were more sales in South Waterfront [in 2020] than there were [in 2019],’ says Sean Z. Becker, owner and broker of Sean Z. Becker Real Estate. But prices per square foot dropped 7 percent between March and September of 2020, he says, rolling back about five years of price increases.”
“In the Pearl, condo prices dropped more than 10 percent, back to their 2014 value, says Judie Dunken, broker and owner of Judie Dunken Real Estate.”
From I Love The Upper West Side in New York. “The owner of a nine-unit Upper West Side building was forcibly removed from the property after losing a foreclosure case which began in 2019, Commercial Observer reports. Kim Mortimer is now the former owner of 60 West 91st Street, where she was also a tenant. After defaulting on her loan, she reportedly allowed the building to fall into disrepair. She borrowed $1.7 million from her lender in 2016. After late fees, penalties and interest, she ended up owing $3.4 million.”
“Mortimer filed two actions to prevent her removal, based on the eviction moratorium created during the pandemic. The case ended up back in court, and the judge again ruled to have Mortimer removed. As Mortimer refused, the judge had US Marshalls forcibly remove her. After a recent bankruptcy sale of the building, Mortimer was able to pay back $2.1 out of the $3.4 million she owed to her lender.”
From My Northwest. “Many may remember Washington Mutual Savings Bank, at one point operating as the nation’s largest thrift institution. It was built up by former CEO Kerry Killinger, and then in 2008 during the now-infamous housing crash, it was seized by the feds on grounds that it was insolvent. Except when looking at Killinger’s new book Nothing Is Too Big to Fail, he argues the bank was stolen.”
“‘We think the feds are once again taking us down a position of severe risks in the economy for a potential another bursting of bubbles like the stock market and housing and the like. And we figured that the only way they’re going to learn so they don’t repeat some of those same mistakes is to get a lot of those true facts out there,’ he told Seattle’s Morning News with Ross.”
“‘Let me just give a couple of very quick factoids similar to today where we see risk of a housing bubble,’ he continued. ‘We started warning the feds, the Federal Reserve, the major regulators, our shareholders, and everybody else about four years before the financial crisis, that housing prices were getting too high and that we were in for some form of correction,’ he said.”
“Did we at least learn a lesson from it such that it won’t happen again? ‘I think the lessons learned from this is that whenever we get in these periods of encouraging asset bubbles like the Fed did leading up to the last financial crisis, they kept interest rates below the rate of inflation for an extended period of time. And guess what? Housing prices rose at an unrealistic level,’ he said. ‘I’m hoping we have learned from that because that’s exactly what we’re seeing again today.’”
From The Real Deal. “Compass’ hotly anticipated IPO is finally (almost) here. The venture capital-backed residential firm is set to go public in the coming days, after federal regulators on Monday approved its initial public offering, SEC filings show. Founded in 2012 by Robert Reffkin and Ori Allon, Compass jolted the brokerage industry by raising $1.5 billion from investors, including SoftBank, and aggressively hiring top agents from competitors. It later scooped up firms wholesale in an unprecedented growth spurt.”
“Ahead of its stock market debut, Compass indicated it would seek a $10 billion valuation — testing, once and for all, whether investors believe it’s a tech company or simply a gussied-up residential brokerage. In a March 29 research note, investment firm New Constructs argued the latter. ‘Currently, the company looks more like a traditional brokerage with flashy marketing, whose only advantage is a virtually unlimited ability to burn cash,’ wrote David Trainer, the firm’s founder. ‘SoftBank needs this IPO more than investors do.’”
“Compass could raise nearly $1 billion in its IPO, and that cash would fuel its continued growth. The firm’s revenue more than doubled to $2.4 billion in 2019. Last year, boosted by the hot U.S. housing market, it raked in $3.7 billion. But Compass isn’t profitable, and its S-1 revealed $1 billion in cumulative losses.”