A report from the Seattle Times in Washington. “In King County, 73% more homes were listed at the end of May than at the same time last year. In Pierce County 74% more and in Kitsap 43%. In Snohomish, more than twice as many listings were still active at the end of the month. In a region dominated by tech companies that offer their employees stock options, homebuyers who hoped to tap into those stocks to help buy a house might be unsettled by recent dives in the stock market. ‘They are not able to get some loans that they wanted to using those stocks,’ said Debbie Barbara, a Redfin agent based on the Eastside.. ‘People who thought they could buy a million-plus home can’t.’”
“And with more homes and less buyer interest come price drops. Barbara recently represented sellers who, after some back and forth with buyers, accepted an offer of about $50,000 below the list price for their five-bedroom home in Sammamish. ‘The fact that we negotiated — that’s just something I haven’t had to do in a very long time,’ she said.”
The News Tribune in Washington. “Pierce County saw a 73.64 percent increase in total active listings for homes compared with a year ago, with 1,909 new listings for single-family residential homes in May. Listings in Snohomish County increased from 500 to 1,182 listings. Cowlitz, Island, and Walla Walla counties also nearly doubled their inventories from a year ago, according to NWMLS. Dick Beeson, managing broker at RE/MAX Northwest Realtors in Gig Harbor, noted some signs of normalcy returning. ‘Sellers are now more often required to consider offers contingent upon financing, inspections or the sale of the buyer’s home. Things that were normal in purchase contracts just two years ago are making their return,’ he said.”
From News 3 in Nevada. “‘I think it’s still crazy, but we’re starting to see signs of it coming back to some reality,’ said Brandon Roberts, the head of Las Vegas Realtors. ‘So about three and a half weeks ago I started feeling a shift in our marketplace with the listings that I had on,’ said Realtor Vandana Bhalla. ‘We weren’t getting as many offers on the listings, we weren’t getting as many buyers viewing the properties.’”
“Why? Buyers face headwinds: a stock market swoon, inflation and rising mortgage rates, which, for a 30-year fixed, sit at over 5%. A year ago it was about 3%. Sellers face a new reality, too. The days of dozens of offers are history, for now. One piece of good news is the inventory of available homes is up. In May, there were 3,570 homes without offers. That’s up 46% from April and 76% from a year ago.”
From Socket Site in California. “The net number of homes on the market in San Francisco ticked another 6 percent over the past week from what was already a higher 11-year seasonal high to nearly 1,300 listings, driven by a pronounced slowdown in the pace of sales, trends which shouldn’t have caught any plugged-in readers by surprise. As such, there are now nearly 40 percent more homes on the market in San Francisco than there were at this time last year, 80 percent more than there were prior to the pandemic, and 150 percent more than there were in June of 2015.”
From WTOP. “Foreclosure starts are on the rise now that government protections against lenders starting them have ended, and 8.3% of homes in some stage of foreclosure in Baltimore are unoccupied, behind only Cleveland among big cities with a large share of vacant foreclosures. Those properties are called zombie foreclosures. ‘Sometimes it can take up to three years for a foreclosure to get processed,’ said Rick Sharga, executive vice president of market intelligence for property data firm ATTOM Data Solutions.”
“‘At some point, the borrowers frankly just give up and move on and leave the property behind because they know it is inevitable that they are going to lose it at some point. Nobody is actually tending to the property. The borrower has abandoned it. And the lender can’t take possession of the property until the foreclosure has been finalized. So now you have a property that nobody is taking care of, and nobody is monitoring,’ Sharga said.”
The Business Times in Colorado. “‘It’s still a healthy market,’ said Robert Bray, chief executive officer of Bray & Co. Real Estate based in Grand Junction. Fewer sales helped bolster inventory. At the end of May, there were 365 active listings. That’s up 68.2 percent over the same time a year ago. Annette Young, administrator coordinator at Heritage Title Co. in Grand Junction, said 16 foreclosure filings were reported in May, bringing to 120 the filings through the first five months of 2022. In contrast, there were eight filings during the same span last year.”
From Blog TO in Canada. “Given how ridiculously unreasonable Toronto real estate prices are known to be, it may be understandably hard to believe the recent chatter about the market potentially cooling off, but the latest numbers indicate that the trend is indeed going that way. The number of home sales was down a shocking 38.8 per cent last month compared to the same time last year, and nine per cent from the month prior, even though listing numbers remained high — active listings were up 26 per cent from May 2021.”
“Though the average price for the month was 9.4 per cent higher than last May, hitting $1,212,806 for the region, prices and the MLS Home Price Index Composite Benchmark did indeed fall month-over-month, reversing a long-running trend. When compared to February’s peak, this marks a drop of a staggering $121,000, which has happened slowly over the last three months.”
Canadian Mortgage Trends. “As it becomes clear that home sales and prices in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) are declining, industry professionals are trying to figure out what lies ahead. The year-over-year declines in sales actually started in mid-2021, but they became steep only in the last three months (see chart below). Right from the start of 2022, as sellers remained optimistic while buyers became skeptical, the sales-to-new-listings ratio started a steep and steady decline that ended at 39% in May – buyer’s market territory. Thus, in only a few months, the GTA housing market went almost straight from a seller’s to a buyer’s market.”
“There was a three-month delay as the sales-to-new-listings ratio started to fall in January, while the average home price started to decline in March. Clearly, it took a few months for sellers to realize that the demand they counted on was not there anymore and for buyers to learn that they now had enough negotiating power to push down prices.”
The Daily Mail Australia. “‘Liar loan’ applicants who stretched the truth in their mortgage applications are now at major risk of falling behind in their repayments and even losing their homes after the largest rate rise in 22 years. The panic is being sparked by a revealing recent survey by UBS which found 37 per cent of borrowers in the six months to December 2021 ‘made false representations on their application’ in order to get a more desirable home.”
“The research also found that 55 per cent of ANZ mortgage holders had been ‘less than honest’ when borrowing the money. At other major lenders, Westpac had 40 per cent of customers tell fibs, Commonwealth Bank had 30 per cent and NAB had 19 per cent. Dale Gillham from Wealth Within said liar loans are nothing out of the ordinary in Australia. ‘Liar loans are normal and the recent figures would not be a surprise to the RBA,’ he said.”
The Spinoff in New Zealand. “Market rents of comparable Kingsland properties range from $480 a week to $529 at most. Before they moved out, Auckland renter Lucy Whitelock-Bell and her flatmates were offered another year, at $765 a week, on their fixed-term lease. The previous year, the rent had risen $10, to $750. The flatmates declined to renew and as soon as the property was listed online, the price dropped to $760 – ‘a slap in the face’, as Whitelock-Bell describes it. It’s now listed at $690.”
“Barfoot & Thompson director Kiri Barfoot sees parallels with a rental of hers, a two-bedroom unit in St Heliers that, at $500 a week a year ago, had people ‘all over it.’ So far in 2022, though, only one person has inquired about it, she says with a laugh, ‘and that’s after the property manager made a few phone calls.’ Typically, landlords will raise the rent $10 to $20 as they search for new tenants. But Barfoot hasn’t changed the price, ‘which is unusual.’”
“Because of a glut in supply in Wellington, studios and one-bedroom apartments in the CBD have dropped to under $400 a week – a price ‘unheard of’ before the pandemic, says Harrison Vaughan, managing director of property management company Tommy’s. In mid-May, it saw the most active rental listings ever on Trade Me at just under 1,000 (it’s now over 1,450). Usually, the market holds 400 properties at most for mid-autumn, and the increase is giving renters ‘plenty of choice’ for the first time in years. Vaughan believes the rental market is at the start of a ‘major turning point’ and landlords might need to start marketing themselves to stand out. ‘Throw in some whiteware, maybe a free week’s rent, or even offer to contribute towards moving costs,’ he says.”
“Barfoot is hearing that tenants are becoming more price-sensitive, which isn’t surprising. ‘Most landlords would have to up rent by $100 to $200 a week to break even, but ‘you’re not going to get any tenants if you do that.’ Conversely, if renters can save $20 a week on rent, ‘they will.’”
From KPBS. “Marco put his home up for sale, a concrete, one-bedroom house outside the Cuban capital, just blocks from the beach. He’s hoping to sell almost everything he has to fund the journey out of Cuba. ‘Everything is for sale. … Everything,’ he says. Marco doesn’t want to use his full name because he’s afraid he could face government repercussions for talking about his plans to leave the country.”
“Marco was asking $15,000 for his house. Now he says he would even take $8,000. One real estate broker in Havana describes the housing market as ‘fishing season,’ because so much property is up for sale. He asks to be identified only as Alfredo, so he can speak freely about his work. Alfredo sells everything in U.S. dollars and all transactions take place outside Cuba. He has more than 2,000 listings available. ‘If on one block there are 24 houses, 20 of them are for sale. And the other four are considering selling,’ he says, ‘no lie!’”