A report from the Aiken Standard in South Carolina. “We’re seeing a lot of people that when we come down and say, ‘here’s your monthly payment,’ (they say), ‘well, that’s just too much,’ said Matthew Hunter, branch manager at Assurance Financial.”
The Columbia Basin Herald in Washington. “‘A lot of the buyers right now are gauging those prices based on interest rates and what their monthly payment’s going to be. And for a lot of buyers, they’re not as concerned at the actual sale price as they are at the monthly payments. That’s really kind of where the rubber meets the road for them,’ said Brian Gentry of Re/Max Northwest Realtors in Othello. ‘It’s interesting because if something’s not priced right, you can tell pretty quickly because it’s gonna sit for a while…A year ago if something was priced right, it would be pending in a week or less.’”
The Denver Business Journal in Colorado. “Might a sense of normalcy be returning to Denver’s housing market? It appears so, according to June’s monthly report from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors (DMAR). The first months of the year were a haze of record appreciation, bidding wars and low inventory, but May marked a different story for the Denver housing market. With 448 more properties on the market than in April, the metro area ended the month of May with 3,652 properties, a staggering 76% increase over last year at the same time.”
“During May, 8.3% of listings reduced their asking price before receiving an offer in May, compared to 6.9% last May. ‘As summer approaches, and Denver continues to see a shift from the peak of the real estate market, we will see changes in how the market operates compared to the beginning of the year,’ Andrew Abrams, chair of the DMAR Market Trends Committee and Denver-area realtor, said in the report.”
The Herald Tribune in Florida. “In 2017, we were introduced to the term ‘iBuyer’ by Stephen Kim, an equity research analyst. An abbreviation for ‘instant buyer,’ it was coined for the practice of institutional purchasing of residential properties directly from owners. IBuying has proven, over these years, to be a grand experiment in search of economic justification. A path proving anything but easy. As of last year, only Offerpad turned the corner by reaching an average positive margin on purchases, while others continue to bleed capital through extensive losses.”
“Some are throwing in the towel. The housing goliath Zillow exited iBuying in November of last year after realizing over $28,000 in an average loss per home. Mike Del Prete, an industry writer, perfectly captured iBuying economics in his phrase ‘red is the new black.’ Not demonstrating sustainable profitability would seem normal for the first few years of proving a concept, yet massive losses are occurring in an environment of housing prices growing at the fastest pace in history. With the industry now returning to sanity and prices trimming and even predicted to slightly turn in some categories, the capacity to turn a profit will become nothing less than herculean. Game over?”
From Bloomberg. “From Seattle to Silicon Valley to Austin, a grim new reality is setting in across the tech landscape: a heady, decades-long era of rapid sales gains, boundless jobs growth and ever-soaring stock prices is coming to an end. What’s emerging in its place is an age of diminished expectations marked by job cuts and hiring slowdowns, slashed growth projections and shelved expansion plans. ‘They are no longer sure bets,’ said Tom Forte, a tech analyst at D.A. Davidson, of the technology industry’s behemoths. ‘They aren’t sure bets because there are a number of fundamental things working against them.’”
“The specter of job cuts has begun to haunt the Silicon Valley psyche. Russell Hancock, CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a nonprofit that studies Silicon Valley and its economy added he also worries that some of the shine and innovation of the tech industry is going away as products like streaming services and social networking become more of a utility. It’s possible ‘we’ll start to think about sort of like the gas lines going into our homes, or electricity,’ he said. ‘That’s kind of a new thing for Silicon Valley. It’s sort of a Detroit kind of existence where cars just became the backdrop, the furniture of the region.’”
From Business Insider. “Stocks are dipping, startups are flopping, and a possible recession threatens tech giants that once seemed untouchable. ‘This will be in the top-three corrections of the last 20 years — joining the 2008-2009 Great Recession and the 2000 dot-com crash,’ said David Sacks, a cofounder and partner at Craft Ventures.”
From Tech Crunch. “Startups across all sectors, from healthcare to enterprise SaaS to crypto, are laying off portions of staff and citing, seemingly, from the same notes. Despite cuts happening across all stages, many of the recent layoffs have come from companies that, just one year ago, hit unicorn status. The list includes Cameo, IRL and Loom.”
From Yahoo Finance. “At Gary Vaynerchuk’s multi-day non-fungible token (NFT) conference ‘VeeCon’in Minneapolis, there was no visible sign of the market collapse that preceded the crypto-palooza. And yet, in the prior six weeks, more than $1 trillion in crypto assets had been wiped away while the value of NFTs fell more than 80% from their market peak. ‘I said it in August, I said it in July, and I said it in May,’ Vaynerchuk told Yahoo Finance, ‘ saw this coming — that [a crash driven by short-term greed] is absolutely potentially what we’re in. It’s just starting, there’s a correction.’”
From The Street. “The tough time that the crypto sphere is going through is not about to go away. Judging by the recent decisions announced by the big names in the sector, it is even logical to say that what industry sources call ‘crypto winter’ will continue for several more weeks, at least, even if volatility is the key word in the space. Recent scandals, such as the collapse of the UST and Luna coins, have also reminded investors that the industry is still young and therefore subject to many ups and downs. The crypto market has lost over $1.7 trillion in value since November.”
The Langley Advance Times in Canada. “Average prices for single family homes in Langley have dropped sharply as the number of sales has plunged over the past few months, new data from the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board (FVREB) shows. In May, 94 detached homes in Langley changed hands, down 50.8 per cent from the 191 houses sold in the same month a year ago. the overall average price was $1.596 million, down from $1.796 million, an 11.2 per cent drop.”
“The median price of a detached house in Langley was $1.545 million, down 5.8 per cent from the previous month. A similar pattern, but less extreme, was seen for townhouses and condos. ‘Since March, we’ve seen sales come down with an accompanying increase in inventory, subsequently restoring much-needed balance and cooling our heated market,’ said FVREB president Sandra Benz. ‘While still early, it suggests that as we gradually settle into a post-pandemic sate of work and life, the big pandemic-era drivers – working from home and record low interest rates – may have run their course.’”
“Meanwhile, sales in major cities across Canada are dropping after almost two years of frantic activity that saw both home sales and prices shoot up to never-before-seen levels. In February 2020, the benchmark and average prices for a single family home in Langley were just over $1 million. Starting in the late spring of 2020, the average price of a single family home in the Fraser Valley shot up from just over $1 million to a peak of $1.9 million in February of this year. Langley houses peaked at just under $1.8 million in April. Since then, the average price has begun a steep decline and is now below $1.7 million.”
From All Homes in Australia. “It’s well known that Canberra’s house prices rocketed over the past two years, but what might raise eyebrows is that the capital was out-gunned by its regional neighbours. However, agents said the winds of change had since swept in on the back of rising interest rates, tighter lending restrictions, inflation, the federal election and other disruptions. Michael Henley of Henley Property, who specialises in the Snowy Monaro region, said the fear of missing out (FOMO) which drove the price extremes seen in the past two years had been replaced by a new paradigm.”
“‘Buyers could now be said to be exhibiting a fear of paying too much, and that’s a big turnaround in attitude,’ he said. ‘The highs of the last two years saw prices in Jindabyne double – and more – across all dwelling types. Units went from the high $100,000s to $400,000. Berridale was the same: a $300,000 house became $600,000. And that was a typical phenomenon across the region. We’re not seeing that kind of emotion driving prices now.’”
“Pat Jameson of Blackshaw Coastal in Batemans Bay said demand for South Coast properties had soared during the pandemic, driving incredible price growth. ‘I recall one example where a house in Batemans Bay went from $750,000 to $1.2 million in one year,’ she said.”
From Stuff New Zealand. “An Upper Hutt property that was bought for $1.1 million last year but sold for $950,000 this year returned the biggest loss of any resale in the first part of this year, new research shows. While two of the five biggest resale losses were in Auckland, there was a geographical spread in the results and the biggest loss was in the Wellington region.”
“The property, which is at 16 McEwan Crescent in Riverstone Terraces in Upper Hutt, sold for $950,000 in January. But it was bought for $1.1m last May. That means the seller suffered a loss of $150,000 – before any real estate commissions are taken into account.”
“The property that returned the fifth-biggest resale loss was the only one to have been held by the owner for longer than 18 months. It was a three-bedroom house at 17 Derby Street in Westport in the Buller district. The property, which has a large 1012 sqm section, was sold in January for $115,000. But when the seller bought it in early 2010, they paid $170,000. After owning it for 12 years, they had a loss of $55,000.”