A report from the Star Tribune in Minnesota. “Jordan Maetche and Alyssa Budion bought a townhouse in Plymouth two years ago — when mortgage rates were at record lows, and sellers called the shots — making their offer quickly and paying the full price of $230,000. By this spring when they decided to upgrade to a bigger house, momentum in the housing market had begun to shift: Mortgage rates had doubled, and several other homes just like theirs were also for sale. When they listed their townhouse, they had several showings and even garnered some offers, but they were all too far below their asking price. ‘Everybody said, ‘It’s going to sell so fast,’ Budion said. ‘It couldn’t have been more opposite.’”

“After several weeks, they finally managed an acceptable offer, but they still ended up selling for a couple thousand less than they were asking. On the flip side, their new house in Otsego, originally listed for $430,000, dropped in price to $374,990, enabling them to swiftly make an offer. And in addition to the price reduction, they were able to swing a discounted mortgage rate, which saved them several hundred dollars a month. ‘It was a roller-coaster ride,’ Budion said. ‘We weren’t mentally prepared for all the obstacles along the way.’ For prospective buyers, any movement away from the days of offers well above asking price or concessions like waived inspections is welcome news. ‘People who want to sell are still selling, but it might take a little longer or take more prep work to get ready for the market,’ said Andy Sopher, the agent who worked with Budion and Maetche. ‘But buyers are not throwing caution to the wind like they did in 2020.’”

Delaware Online. “Are home prices in Delaware actually falling? In June and July they did, and the county with the highest prices saw the largest drop. July marked the second straight monthly decline in the Delaware median home sales price since the record high of $393,267 in May. That’s for existing homes, not new construction. In June, the price dipped to $389,833, and then in July it fell again to $374,000, according to the Delaware Association of Realtors. More significantly, the median home sales price in July dropped compared to the same month a year ago when it was $378,333, a decrease of 1.15%. That’s the first time in six years there has been a decrease in the year-over-year price, since July 2018. Inventory of homes for sale jumped 30.01% to 3,496 in July, from 2,689 one year ago. Sussex County’s median sold price was the highest in Delaware at $425,000 in July. But the county also saw the largest drop, down 5.56% from $450,000 one year ago.”

From Vail Daily. “Eagle County’s residential real estate market continues to improve and shift toward a more balanced market, with inventory approximately 21% higher than the same time in 2023. ‘Sellers who price their properties right are still seeing multiple offers in the under $850,000 price range,’ said Scooter Slaughter, broker associate with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Colorado Properties’ Gypsum office. ‘Conversely, sellers who list outside of market value are seeing little to no offers, losing important initial listing momentum. This ultimately leads to having to lower their price if they are serious about selling.’”

WWSB in Florida. “More than two weeks after Hurricane Debby flooded parts of Sarasota, residents off Bahia Vista Street continue gutting homes and drying out. Street after street, lined with mountains of destroyed personal belongings. ‘The neighborhood has been decimated. I mean, all life is gone,’ said Dana Burnell, a resident on Courtland St. According to Burnell, most of the residents in the area don’t have flood insurance and that’s only making the situation worse. ‘It’s just awful and when I drive through here, I’m just, you know, I feel like crying and that’s what I’ve seen a lot of my neighbors do. Everybody’s just crying, what else can you do,’ said Burnell. Burnell said the area has turned into a ghost town, especially at night.”

WFAE in North Carolina. “A plan for 113 permanent supportive housing units at the former Ramada Inn drew criticism at Tuesday’s Housing and Community Development Committee meeting. A new California developer hopes to do what another California developer failed to do over a three-year span: convert the run-down hotel into housing for the city’s unhoused population and veterans. But committee members questioned whether the new proposal from Friendship For Affordable Housing (FFAH), a for-profit firm based in Los Angeles, could be successful. Brian Methvin, CoC funding committee chair, called the proposal ‘a really big disappointment.’ Methvin cited concerns over property management of the site and an uncertainty over what would happen to the site should the developer have ‘extremely long periods of negative cash flow.’”

“This summer, the Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care, the region’s homelessness planning body, was charged with vetting the project on behalf of the City of Asheville. Nonetheless, the CoC’s board ended up narrowly voicing its support for the project in a 7-6 vote. ‘This is crazy,’ council member Antanette Mosley said of the proposal, which bears similarities to the 2021 version that failed. ‘I just feel like I’m in a moment of déjà vu all over again.’”

The Los Angeles Times in California. “San Francisco and Humboldt County officials are trading jabs over Mayor London Breed’s plans to more aggressively promote a city program that pays to relocate homeless people to other communities where they have family or other ties. During their Tuesday meeting, Humboldt County supervisors debated sending a draft letter, addressed to Breed, questioning whether San Francisco was making sure the homeless people it’s busing out actually land housing and jobs. The supervisors were responding to a recent report in the San Francisco Standard that found the counties of Sacramento, Los Angeles and Humboldt were the top three destinations for homeless people bused out of San Francisco since September 2023.”

“‘We don’t need to be a dumping ground,’ Humboldt County Supervisor Rex Bohn said at the meeting. ‘Our cost for taking care of a homeless person that has nothing up here … it’s expensive.’ Bohn claimed, San Francisco hasn’t tracked people who relocated to Humboldt County to make sure they landed on their feet and have found employment and stable housing. ‘All you have to do is ask, ‘I want to go here,’ and you get a bus ticket, and you get to go. No follow-up, no everything else,’ Bohn said. In addition, he said, San Francisco is essentially giving homeless people a choice between leaving town and legal action. ‘I don’t want to hurt San Francisco’s feelings,’ he said. ‘But on the other hand, I don’t care.’”

WGGB in Massachusetts. “The former owner of a luxury home building business in West Springfield was sentenced on Tuesday for conspiring to defraud the United States and creating false documents to help one of his clients get a mortgage. 66-year-old Kent Pecoy who previously lived in Wilbraham was sentenced to one day in prison and two years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay a 24-thousand dollar fine and almost 36-thousand dollars in restitution.”

Bisnow Washington DC. “A downtown D.C. office building that Korean investor Mirae Asset Global Investments acquired as part of a 2015 real estate fund has been taken over by its lender. Bridge Investment Group, which provided Mirae with a $68.5M refinancing loan in 2020 on 1750 K St. NW, has gained control of the asset through a statutory warranty deed, according to documents filed with the D.C. Recorder of Deeds. The asset’s valuation decline has been previously disclosed. In May 2023, the property’s value had fallen to 25% of its purchase price, The Korea Economic Daily reported at the time. That contributed to the overall fund posting losses of more than 70.2% at the time.”

The Globe and Mail in Canada. “The companies responsible for building housing are raising alarm bells that all is not well with B.C.’s real estate industry – responsible for about 20 per cent of B.C.’s GDP, including rental and leasing, according to Statistics Canada. It’s routine for developers to complain about regulations getting in the way, but the tenor of complaint is more frantic these days. They’re watching Toronto’s capsizing preconstruction condo market – taking on the burden of high costs – with a wary eye. They say profit margins are shrinking in B.C. as well, and many projects are either stalled or disappearing.”

“‘When we’re seeing housing starts decline, fall off a cliff like we’ve seen particularly in Toronto, and here as well – just not to the extreme extent that we’ve seen it back east – you have to wonder,’ says Brad Jones, senior vice-president of development for Wesgroup Properties. ‘You would think with such a housing supply shortage, it would be really easy to build a lot of housing. And it’s really, really hard to build housing.’ Mr. Jones counts 62 residential projects by other developers in Metro Vancouver that are in financial distress – and more than 10,000 housing units that won’t get built as a result.”

From Victoria News. “A recent news article reports the B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Branch allowed two landlords to hike rent by 23.5%. According to the article, one of the big five banks issued to two speculators (referred to in the article as ‘landlords’) variable rate mortgages for which the bank accepted as collateral properties these two ‘investors’ foolishly assumed – as did the bank – that tenants would pay rents sufficient to meet their mortgage payments. There are several problems here, none of which are the responsibility of the tenants and all of which illuminate the corruption and assumed impunity at the heart of the financialization of housing in Canada.”

“Most glaringly, the bank in question ignored in assessing the creditworthiness of these would-be ‘landlords’ that they were borrowing to speculate. This should be a giant red flag for any loan officer, whose sole purpose in life is to perform due diligence to establish that it will be repaid before approving any loan. These speculators and this bank both knew that the rate of increase in the rents they could demand per the Rental Tenancy Act is less than the rate at which their mortgage payments could (or would depending on the terms of the loan) increase. The loan is a bad loan. The correct solution is for the bank to write it down. Investments are not magic money machines that always make a profit. Speculators frequently lose money, as do banks careless enough to loan it to them.”

The Financial Times. “First it was the ‘green lairds,’ billionaire investors such as Danish retailer Anders Povlsen, who were buying up stretches of the Scottish Highlands to rewild grouse-shooting moors. And the wealthy rewilders have more recently been joined by fund managers investing in commercial forestry and peatland restoration, eyeing incentivised schemes for voluntary carbon credits that can be bought to offset UK-based emissions. But the latest rush for the Scottish landscape has topped out, deflating a bubble not seen for decades. The slump is indicative of a market that, despite its potential, has yet to mature, say institutional investors. Questions over the validity of carbon credits, weaker economic conditions and delays in forestry scheme approvals have blown the froth off an overheated market.”

“UK and Scottish government funding is available to plant trees and restore peatland. Between 2021 and 2022 applications for natural capital schemes to the Woodland Carbon Code, a UK-government backed body that oversees woodland creation projects, accelerated, contributing to a spike in land prices. The value of hill land quadrupled and that of estates trebled from 2018 to 2021. Natural capital investors, having paid increasingly large sums for land, were caught on the wrong side of inflationary pressures, rising interest rates and lower timber prices. The retreat of institutional investors has facilitated a resurgence of ‘lifestyle’ buyers looking for a sporting estate or family property, said Patrick Porteus of sales agency Landfor. Valuations of land have dipped by 20-25 per cent in the past two years, he added.”

The Daily Telegraph in Australia. “Home prices in a variety of Sydney suburbs have been pulled level – or lower – than they were a decade ago. And plenty more areas have seen only marginal price rises of less than 5 per cent over 10 years due to a high volume of newly constructed homes easing pressure on buyers to pay more. This is according to bombshell analysis provided exclusively to The Saturday Telegraph, revealing runaway rises in prices – while the norm in most areas – were not ubiquitous across Sydney. The bulk of the 10-year price freezes or falls were in new development hot spots in the northwest, Parramatta region and St George area, the analysis of PropTrack data showed.”

“Properties were most frequently selling for lower than in 2014 in Sydney Olympic Park, according to the PropTrack figures. Units in the area currently cost an average of about $685,000, lower than the $700,000 reported 10 years ago. In Austral, in Sydney’s southwest, where acreages were subdivided to make way for smaller houses, resulting in the median house price dropping $517,000 over 10 years. ‘There has been a high volume of new apartments over the last decade and the volume of stock has kept a lid on prices,’ said PropTrack director of research Cameron Kusher. High profile building disasters such as the Opal Tower cracking in Sydney may have also encouraged some buyers to be more cautious with new apartment purchases, Mr Kusher added.”

The Sydney Morning Herald. “The chairman of the world’s largest steel producer, Baowu Steel, had a grim warning for staff when they gathered for the company’s half-yearly meeting this month, one that would reverberate around the world, rattling markets and investors. The Australian government was also taking note. The Chinese steel industry was facing a ‘harsh winter,’ one that would be ‘longer, colder and more difficult to endure than we expected,’ chairman Hu Wangming told staff. What’s more, the challenge would be worse than previous major downturns in 2008 and 2015.”

“The price of iron ore, the key steelmaking ingredient, collapsed to its lowest level since 2022 this month, having plunged more than 30 per cent this year, as a crisis has rippled through China’s domestic steel industry. The main culprit is the floundering Chinese property market and the millions of homes left unfinished, unsold or vacant across the country – and no sign that President Xi Jinping will mount a large-scale rescue effort. Instead, a key plank of Xi’s economic plan is to shift China away from a property-heavy growth model to one powered by high-tech industries and advanced manufacturing in areas like EVs, solar panels, semiconductors, and AI.”

“On Monday, BlueScope Steel reported full-year earnings of $860.7 million, down 22 per cent, citing falling steel prices and rising costs. Chief executive Mark Vassella said Chinese companies were flooding Asian markets with cheap steel as they tried to offload excess supply due to dried up domestic demand in China’s property sector. ‘And what that’s done is that’s driven pressure on price, which then comes back to our domestic market here in Australia,’ he told ABC TV’s The Business program last week.”