A report from the New Hampshire Business Review. “Sales have been down all year to some extent, but mainly due to shrinking inventory. In the last few months, something else is going on. ‘Certainly, interest rates slowed things down,’ said Adam Gaudet, owner of 603 Birch Realty in Concord and president of the Realtors Association. ‘Buyers aren’t in as much of a frenzy as they were in the spring. They are not going to rush in and overpay for something. Those days of $30,000 over asking are not happening,’”
Fort Worth Report in Texas. “Change is in the air in the Tarrant County home-buying market. ‘We are at a point where buyers that were sitting on the fence are rushing to snag homes at prices much lower than what was available just a few short months ago,’ said Mason Whitehead, home loan specialist at Churchill Mortgage.”
The San Francisco Chronicle in California. “Patrick Carlisle, Compass’ chief market analyst, said that while economic headwinds are affecting real estate markets everywhere, downtown San Francisco’s condo market has been hit especially hard. ‘That market has been hit hardest in the city,’ Carlisle told SFGATE. This is due to a few different factors, he said, one being the mass abandonment of downtown office spaces since the start of the pandemic. ‘San Francisco went from probably being the hottest office market in the country to being about the weakest,’ Carlisle said. ‘High-tech workers were the ones who were most likely to say, ‘Well, I can work from any place. I’ll move someplace where housing costs 90% less.’”
“According to a recent report from Compass, the median sales price of a two-bedroom condo in downtown areas has dropped by 16% since 2021, compared to a 7% drop in the price of two-bedroom condos outside of that area. The report also states that condo inventory in this area is more than twice as high as the rest of the city — which explains the seemingly empty high-rises looming everywhere downtown.”
“‘Of course, there are people who see this as an opportunity to get a good deal,’ Carlisle said. ‘There are condos selling in the newer luxury developments in the South Beach and Yerba Buena areas at large discounts from what people paid for them three, four years back.’”
The Daily Mail on California. “The Four Seasons residences sat just four blocks from San Francisco’s infamous open air drugs market, the Tenderloin Linkage Center. Opened in January, the government-funded center was billed as a space where drug abusers could use safely, and seek out help for their addictions. But it quickly descended into anarchy, and closed earlier this month having cost $22 million – and San Francisco’s once golden reputation as a destination for tourists and businesses. The city’s office occupancy is now even lower than the percentage of workers back in other woke cities like New York City, which reported a 46 percent occupancy, and Los Angeles, which had 45 percent occupancy.”
“Now, residents say they are arming themselves with baseball bats to combat the rampant crime they say these drug users are bringing to the neighborhood. As one resident, only identified as Ghis, told ABC 7, these centers have resulted in ‘more troublemakers settling in, feeling comfortable doing their drugs, pissing and s****ting in the street blocking the sidewalks.’ He added that the neighborhood was going through ‘a period of insanity.’”
The Los Angeles Times. “Southern California home prices fell in November, marking the fifth time in six months that prices declined. In individual Southern California counties, home price declines from the peak range from a 3.5% drop in San Bernardino County to an 8.6% drop in Orange County. In Los Angeles County, prices are down 7%. In Riverside County, the typical home price fell 0.5% from October to $599,428 last month. Prices are now 4.6% lower than the county’s peak reached in June. In San Bernardino County, the typical home price fell 0.6% from October to $523,830 last month. Prices are now 3.5% lower than the county’s peak reached in June.”
“In San Diego County, the typical home price rose 0.1% from October to $877,278 last month. Prices are now 7% lower than the county’s peak reached in April. In Ventura County, the typical home price rose 1.2% from October to $837,891 last month. Prices are now 3.9% lower than the county’s peak reached in May.”
The Commercial Observer on New York. “Availability of empty space in Manhattan has stayed much higher than pre-pandemic levels — between 18 and 19 percent this year— as more companies have opted to downsize or give up their offices entirely. Average asking rents slid from $76 a square foot in the second quarter to $74 a foot in the third quarter. There’s also plenty of office space in the pipeline, with 10 million square feet under construction at sites like 295 Fifth Avenue and 66 Hudson Boulevard.”
“‘The first three quarters of the year in terms of leasing velocity were pretty strong compared to 2021, and then it was like the music stopped,’ said David Hoffman, an office leasing broker at Cushman & Wakefield. ‘Part of that was a reset by the tech industry, which was one of the big drivers of space absorption in New York City. Now you get on the tenant [rep] list for a 10,000-square-foot law firm and landlords are calling you. That’s illustrative of how the leasing market is right now.’”
Seaforth Huron Expositor in Canada. “Grey-Bruce home sales continued to fall in November. Sale prices have also been dropping. The average price of the homes sold last month was $602,448, down 9.7 per cent from November 2021, when the average sale price was $656,605. The highest average monthly price ever recorded in Grey-Bruce was December of 2021, when it reached just under $831,000. Monthly average prices were above $700,000 for the first five months of 2022, first fell below $700,000 in June and has been lower every month since. In October the average sale price was just over $606,000.”
The Deep Dive in Canada. “As Toronto battles an impending housing crisis, its Mayor John Tory warned that real estate investors and landlords could go broke should they contribute in exacerbating the problem with rising costs. To illustrate his point, he encouraged everyone to play the board game Monopoly. Tory also said that the board game teaches you ‘the bad parts of greed.’ ‘If you go too far to try to buy too much houses and charge too much rent to people and say, ‘I’m gonna get rich’? That could often have a very bad ending,’ he explained. ‘If you spend all your money too quickly on buying things up and think you’re gonna be sort of the biggest landlord in this game, you could end up broke.’”
“Tory reportedly maintains four separate homes including an $8 million condo in Yorkville and a Palm Beach property. Twitter user @CanadaRecord also pointed out the irony that while Tory preaches the values of the board game, the mayor continues to ‘work at Rogers [Real Estate Development] in multiple roles at the highest levels.’”
This Is Money in the UK. “Berkeley Group will slow down new developments after sales slumped in recent weeks in another blow for the housing market. The housebuilder sounded the alarm over a cooling market and a ‘toxic’ mix of challenges facing the industry. Mark Crouch, an analyst at broker eToro, warned the results ‘could be an omen for the wider housing market’. He added: ‘There are some warning signs investors will be fretting over.’ ‘Higher mortgage rates are set to quash demand for property, meaning that we could have already seen the high water mark for the housing market.’”
From The Local. “Nobody saw this coming. Everybody saw this coming. Sweden’s red-hot housing market, and the huge loans people took out to buy property, have been worrying economists and regulators for the best part of a decade. After 17 years of dizzying growth, house prices are now falling like a stone. Barely 18 months ago, they were still rising at a crazy 20 percent a year. That rate of growth then slowed, and finally turned negative during the summer.”
“Prices are now falling rapidly, and the fall is accelerating. Prices have already dropped 14 percent from their peak, and the central bank estimates they will plunge by a total of 20 percent. Many economists say this scenario is optimistic. The truth is, nobody knows what’s going to happen. Yet everybody saw this coming. ‘It’s like sitting on a volcano,’ Stefan Ingves, the outgoing central bank governor, said last year about Sweden’s mountain of household debt. ‘I’ve been sitting on the volcano for many, many years,’ he added. House prices trebled between 2005 and 2022, while levels of household debt soared to among the highest in the world.”
“Yet nobody saw this coming. When the pandemic hit, the central bank made it easier to take out a mortgage and encouraged the banks to carry on lending. The Moderate Party, whose leader is now prime minister, went to the polls promising to suspend the requirement for home-owners to pay back the principal on their loans, a measure which could only further fuel the bubble. (The government is now trying to wriggle off that particular hook.)”
“They said it couldn’t happen. House prices would become a problem only if inflation started to rise, forcing the central bank to raise interest rates. Impossible, said Stefan Ingves. In March 2021, he said Swedish inflation would not go above 2 percent. A year later, when it was 4 percent, he said this was “temporary” and it would not go any higher. By September, inflation was almost 10 percent, the highest for decades.”
“However things pan out, some households with large mortgages – especially those who bought property near the peak of the bubble – will experience crippling financial pain, with all the misery that brings. No soothing reassurances from central bankers can hide this fact. The brunt of responsibility must be borne by the centre-right and centre-left governments who sat on their hands during two decades when population growth greatly outstripped the housing supply, creating the massive demand for homes that caused the house price bubble. Now the bubble has burst, and we are all going to pay for it. Hold on tight – it could be a bumpy ride.”
The Free Financial Advisor. “If you’re asking yourself, ‘Why did I buy that house?’ here’s what you need to know about home buyer’s remorse. Home buyer’s remorse is a sense of disappointment and regret that can follow a home purchase. Essentially, you think you made a mistake by purchasing the property, and the feelings of guilt, frustration, uncertainty, fear, or sadness because of it weigh you down. In some cases, home buyer’s remorse happens due to your own views on the purchase. At times, it’s a result of opinions others express to you about your property, creating doubts that weren’t there previously.”
“Dealing with the feelings that come with home buyer’s remorse isn’t easy, but there is a way to move forward. Begin by reminding yourself why you purchase the home in the first place. Spend time appreciating the features that drew you to the property. In some cases, that alone helps you see that the house is an excellent fit for your needs, which can reduce negative feelings about the purchase.”
“It’s also wise to unsubscribe from any email or text alerts relating to real estate in your area. Seeing sale prices or attractive marketing photos may bring about new doubts. Since those comparisons won’t benefit you in any way, unsubscribing can save you unnecessary pain.”