A report from the Sun Sentinel in Florida. “More inventory is coming back to the housing market and closed sales are plummeting as the buyer frenzy of the past year starts to taper. ‘Buyers cannot handle these high prices and high rates … they’re not making offers,’ said Patty Da Silva, real estate broker with Green Realty Properties in Cooper City. ‘And for sellers, I think a big portion of them wanted to take advantage of the market and they were holding for the top, and when it turned a little bit, they put it on the market.’”
“Sellers haven’t necessarily caught up to this change and some have priced their homes too aggressively, believing that the market is still the same as it was a year ago. Mor and more South Florida sellers have had to adjust their prices down, according to Redfin. For West Palm Beach, 20% of homes for sale had a price reduction, up from 12% last year. In Fort Lauderdale, 15% of homes had a price reduction, up from 11% the same time last year. In Miami, 13.7% of homes had a price reduction, an increase from 8% last year. ‘There is no sense of urgency on the buyer’s side. The rates are higher and the prices are still too high and there is a lot more inventory,’ Da Silva said.”
The Tampa Bay Times. “Florida Realtors reported 6,573 active listings across Tampa, St. Pete and Clearwater in June. That’s a 77.7% increase from that same time last year and a 47.9% increase from May. More inventory means sellers may be forced to make some concessions. ‘They’re not getting six offers above asking on the first day anymore,’ said Renee Celli, a Realtor with RE/MAX in St. Pete. So if a buyer finds a home they like that’s slightly out of their price range, ‘make a lower offer. You might be pleasantly surprised.’”
From KTSP. “Minnesota Realtors have released their latest housing report and it shows the market may be slowing slightly. For sellers, Chris Galler, the CEO of Minnesota Realtors recommends patience. ‘It’s not going to sell in a week,’ he said. ‘It’s going to take a few weeks, you’re going to have to be competitive, your property is going to have to be in great shape.’”
The Center Square. “More options are coming to the Maryland housing market for those seeking to buy a home. In addition, escalations and multiple offers are starting to ease, said Maryland Association of Realtors President Craig Wolf. Sellers’ expectations haven’t caught up. He told of one broker’s experience with a homeowner who anticipated a much faster sale. He said, ‘They put their house on the market Friday and the house did not sell by Monday, and they were contemplating canceling their agreement’ with that real estate agent and finding another one because the house took more than three days to sell.”
National Public Radio. “The average sales price continues to climb nationwide, but prices have actually dropped a bit in some of the most overheated markets like Las Vegas, where Tom Blanchard is president-elect of Nevada Realtors. TOM BLANCHARD: I’m sure everybody feels like it’s been a sudden stop. When you’re doing 100 on the highway and all of a sudden you see a cop and you have to slow down to the normal 75, you feel like you’re going really, really slow. Let’s face it, the greed factor was pretty huge. They were trying to get everything they could and then some, and they could do it when there was everybody beating down at their door. Now you’ve got to come back to reality and realize that your house isn’t worth the million dollars that you thought it was. It was only worth $800,000.”
Utah Public Radio. “Utah has now seen one of the biggest housing price cuts in the nation. Salt Lake City has taken the third highest ranking in price cuts according to Redfin, which saw more than half of homes on the market with lowered housing prices. Boise, Idaho and Denver, Colorado took the number one and two spots. Experts say that sellers might have missed the chance to sell their homes at the peak of housing prices, but that it is better to sell sooner rather than later.”
From Geek Wire. “Flyhomes is the latest tech startup to cut jobs. The Seattle real estate company laid off approximately 20% of its staff, a spokesperson confirmed to GeekWire. The company did not provide an updated headcount. It has 763 employees. ‘To build the world’s best home buying and selling experience, we must operate in a manner that is both fiscally prudent and sustainable in the face of uncertain economic conditions,’ the company said. Redfin, another Seattle real estate company, laid off 8% of its workforce last month. Compass also cut jobs and shut down its Seattle-based title business.”
“Other Seattle-area tech startups including Convoy, Qumulo, and Esper have laid off employees in recent months. Google is freezing hiring for two weeks, The Information reported Wednesday. Founded in 2016, Flyhomes helps people buy homes using a cash offer program which presents customers as the equivalent of cash buyers. A majority of the company’s revenue comes from agent commissions.”
From Arizona Family. “A Valley-based realtor says the long-term rental market appears to be growing. According to Shelley Sakala, as of Monday afternoon there were nearly 3,000 active listings in the Valley. She says that’s an 18% increase from last month, and a 113% increase from the same time last year. ‘You’re also going to see a lot of people that are you know, waiting for the market to crash, which we are not thinking is going to be a crash whatsoever,’ Sakala said. ‘But they’re kind of hanging around some of these investors hoping it’ll crash hoping to pick up some properties and then they’re in turn going to turn and use them as rental. So in that case it will create some more rentals for the area.’”
The Herald Banner in Texas. “Buyers are beginning to see more inventory on the market and properties are staying there longer. Sellers are still seeing demand for homes as well as appreciation in prices — just not as great as before. Those broad findings are according to a new in-depth analysis of the DFW-area real estate market by M&D Real Estate. ‘There is a huge shift in the market going on right now,’ said M&D Real Estate Managing Director Danny Perez. ‘The part of the shift we are in currently is what I call, the pause. I call it the pause, because on one hand, there is a seller up here expecting 25% year-over-year growth like we had been seeing. Then on the other hand, there’s a buyer down there saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’”
“‘The sellers will have to be the ones to come down from those 25 % appreciation number expectations to more normal numbers to meet the buyers where they are at,’ said Perez. ‘Not all the way down to (market) correction territory; I don’t believe that is going to happen in this area. But down to a more normalized expectation. These are still crazy numbers on price appreciation for last month.’”
The Houston Chronicle. “In another sign of a cooling housing market, home sellers in Houston are increasingly knocking down their asking price as fewer buyers enter the market. Redfin estimates more than a third (38 percent) of homes on the market in June saw price reductions in the Houston area last month. In Texas, home sellers are seeing the biggest price drops in Austin. About 41.6 percent of homes on the market in Austin had price drops in June, compared to only 14.9 percent the same time last year, according to Redfin. Meanwhile, about 37.5 percent of homes for sale in Dallas and San Antonio had price drops in June, slightly less than Houston.”
The Los Angeles Times. “Southern California home prices and sales edged lower in June from the month before, adding to the pile of evidence that the housing slowdown is starting to pull home values lower. ‘It’s not a huge surprise. We’ve been expecting things to turn negative for a while now,’ said Scott Wild, senior vice president of consulting at John Burns Real Estate Consulting. ‘There’s more supply and less competition, so buyers have a few more options than they used to.’”
“The same trend is carrying across the entire state, according to the California Assn. of Realtors. California’s median home price dropped to $863,790 in June, a 4% decrease from the revised record high of $900,170 recorded in May. The group noted that the price moderation was in part due to a change in the mix of sales in June, ‘as the high-end market started pulling back.’”
KPBS on California. “Mortgage rates remain high but home prices in San Diego seem to be going down. Voltaire Lepe is a real estate broker in San Diego, who thinks the market is slowly turning more neutral. ‘I’m seeing properties on the market a lot longer and I’m seeing buyers have some negotiating power,’ he said. ‘Right now there’s about 4,500 homes for sale compared to the beginning of the year, [when] we had about 1,700 homes for sale,’ he said. ‘So almost triple the amount of homes for sale. So buyers just have more negotiating power. They have a lot more options.’”
The New York Post. “A Brooklyn real estate developer allegedly vanished with over $4 million of his clients’ money — putting the group of 20 Asian immigrant families at risk of being booted from their homes, The Post has learned. The families had entrusted developer Xi Hui ‘Steven’ Wu with tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars each in deposits to buy condos at their Bay Ridge residential building, located at 345 Ovington Ave., according to lawsuits brought by the families and their lawyer.”
“But Wu allegedly disappeared without giving the residents ownership titles to their units — because as it turns out, he didn’t actually have permission from New York state to sell condos in the building, lawsuits brought by the families allege. Edward Cuccia, an attorney representing the families, told The Post that Wu allegedly ‘ran a massive scam where he cheated over 20 immigrant families not only of their life savings but also of their hopes and dreams of owning a home.’”
“‘Now these families are facing eviction and total loss,’ Cuccia said. ‘This is the most egregious case of real estate fraud I have ever seen in my over 30 years of practicing law.’”
The Globe and Mail. “Struggling sellers in Toronto’s condo market are bringing a wave of units for rent to the downtown core. Some frustrated owners are trimming their asking price and still not getting showings, says Christopher Bibby, broker with Re/Max Hallmark Bibby Group Realty, who estimates that condo prices in the city have slipped between six and eight per cent since the peak in early spring. Consumer confidence in Canada has recently plunged to crisis-era levels – and that reading was recorded before the central bank’s 100 basis points interest rate hike in July, says Stephen Brown, senior Canada economist at Capital Economics. The changes have turned buyers’ ‘fear of missing out’ into paralysis.”
“The GTA has seen the number of terminated condo listings surge 643 per cent since January, according to real estate platform Strata.ca. To Anna Wong, a real estate agent with Strata, the cancelled listings signal that sellers are not getting the prices they want, and they are incredulous at the change. ‘They’re saying, ‘I can’t get what my neighbour got a month ago?’ In January, Strata recorded 380 cancelled listings in the condo segment. In June, that number swelled to 2,822.”
“Ms. Wong says investors have been quiet lately because – even when a unit seems like a good deal – they can’t make the math work with the higher interest rates. Looking ahead, Ms. Wong says inventory may diminish and prices may strengthen after Labour Day, but that could cause another swell in listings. ‘If people do well in September and the neighbours see that, they’ll say ‘we’re going to sell too,’ she says. ‘All of a sudden you have 3,000 listings versus 600.’”
From CBC News. “Thousands of Canadians carrying hefty mortgages are scrambling to balance their home budgets after the Bank of Canada raised its benchmark interest rate by a full percentage point to 2.5 per cent last week. ‘If I don’t receive a pay increase or maybe some supplementary income, it will be really tough,’ Kartik Soni said recently as he headed back into the office from a break in downtown London, Ont. Soni has a variable-rate mortgage on the home he bought in London after moving from Brampton with his family six months ago. ‘In January this year, I was paying somewhere around $1,920 and now I’m paying $2,500,’ said Soni of his monthly mortgage payments.”
“Soni’s colleague, Amandeep Singh, is in a similar predicament. He’s locked into a fixed-rate mortgage, but his term is up in six months. ‘I’m scratching my head what to do because the worst is yet to come,’ said Singh. Singh figures once he negotiates the terms of his new mortgage, he’ll also be on the hook for another $500 a month. ‘Going forward, it seems like we will crash,’ said Singh.”
“In an office tower across the street, Ann Leitch is also on a break. ‘We bought our house during COVID, so we’re in a nice interest rate,’ said Leitch, whose home is in Kilworth just outside London. ‘We locked ourselves in safe and sound.’ But Leitch is still facing stresses of her own. ‘Right now my dad has his house up for sale and he’s just happened to put it in at the wrong time,’ she said about the home that’s been on the market for two weeks. ‘It’s actually putting us in a bit of a panic because he’s got an apartment at a seniors’ residence, so this house needs to sell.’”
From Bloomberg. “Some suppliers to Chinese real estate developers are refusing to repay bank loans because of unpaid bills owed to them, a sign that the loan boycott that started with homebuyers is starting to spread. One group of small businesses and suppliers circulated a letter online saying they will stop repaying debts after Evergrande’s cash crisis left them out of pocket. ‘We decided to stop paying all loans and arrears, and advise our peers to decline any requests to be paid on credit or commercial bill,’ the group said in the letter dated July 15, which was sent to the developer’s Hubei office.”
“Homebuyers’ refusal to pay mortgages stems from the widespread practice in China of selling apartments before they’re built. In the past year, overleveraged Chinese developers have been in crisis mode over debt repayment as funds ran dry, and construction has stopped on more and more projects.”
The South China Morning Post. “Henan’s local authorities assigned a bad-loans manager and a state-owned real estate developer to clean up the province’s property mess, taking drastic action to contain a crisis ahead of China’s twice-a-decade leadership conclave. Henan’s provincial capital Zhengzhou is ground zero in the mess, where a banking scam by local fraudsters has combined with a mortgage boycott by disgruntled homebuyers. The scam has run up a tally of 40 billion yuan (US$6 billion) in missing bank deposits and a rare protest by nearly 1,000 depositors. Henan, the home province of China Evergrande Group’s founder Xu Jiayin, also had more unfinished residential projects than anywhere else in China, according to mainland Chinese media.”
“Still, the AMCs face an uphill challenge in cleaning up China’s property mess. Of the mass revolt by mortgage borrowers to pay their loans – affecting more than 280 projects in 86 Chinese cities – over grievances from shoddy quality to non-completion, mostly in Henan province.”