It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “John Bryan was one of dozens of investors spending thousands of dollars to buy properties from a Florida-based company that flipped homes in Johnstown, promised to manage the properties and pay them the rent they collected. Over two years Citrona Homes, LLC is believed to have bought around 200 homes, before suddenly closing up shop earlier this year.”
“What they did during that time is now the subject of local, state, and federal investigations. ‘This guy seemed to have everything covered,’ Bryan said. ‘I feel like an idiot but I’m not the only one. I’m broke, I’m destroyed. I just don’t understand how another human can do that to another human. It just escapes me.’”
“Developers in South Florida are saying that the market for new condo development is either hibernating or forever changed. ‘We’re all not selling very well. I’m not going to lie to you,’ said Gil Dezer, the president of Dezer Development, known for building luxury towers with name brands. Dezer said some of the most recent condo towers that broke ground ‘probably shouldn’t have.’”
“‘New York’s such a worse place than Miami right now, and nobody’s talking about it because there’s a bunch of friendly foreclosures happening quietly or LLC purchases,’ said Property Markets Group Managing partner Ryan Shear. ‘Because in New York, you have to deal with the [Attorney General], which is different than in Florida. And once it goes public in New York, it’s cooked. So a lot of things happen behind the scenes. There’s no pre-sales, no private launch and like the cost basis was $2,500/foot with zero sales and now it’s coming to roost and they haven’t sold a lot of the condo units, and it’s a huge problem.’”
“Zillow economist Jeff Tucker said the San Diego market has mellowed after a jump in price reductions. ‘The story with San Diego was reality setting in after prices had been rising unsustainably fast,’ he said. ‘That’s where you get this mismatch of people’s expectations and what they can really sell for.’”
“A loose group of Spokane professionals has begun working to relieve some of the pressure the area’s housing market is under by bringing ‘zombie homes’ back to life. Spokane Association of Realtors government affairs director Darin Watkins says zombie homes are so called because they are often the result of a stalled foreclosure. They’re unoccupied and neglected, yet they remain the homeowner’s responsibility. Such homes can turn into nuisance properties overrun with squatters, crime, and neglect.”
“The city of Spokane initially had estimated there were about 1,200. By examining how many homes have had water service shut off for at least six months, however, the coalition determined that there are about 3,000 zombie homes in the city. Some lenders also take years to complete the foreclosure process, Watkins says. ‘There’s some evidence, according to the city, that banks are hanging onto these houses for longer than they should — four, five, seven years — because they’re not in the bank’s name yet,’ he claims.”
“Benchmark home prices in Edmonton fell even further last month to their lowest point in more than six years, newly released numbers show. ‘It’s making it difficult for buyers to be financed, even though in theory we’re in a buyer’s market,’ said Michael Brodrick, chair of the Realtors Association of Edmonton. ‘Consumers are just saying, ‘I’m happy to go out for dinner, I’m not happy to spend half a million dollars on a new house.’”
“Damac Properties will shift gears and focus on international luxury resorts in places such as the Maldives, Seychelles, Bali and Marrakech rather than adding to the ‘large oversupply problem’ in the UAE, a senior company official said. ‘The market in UAE, I don’t need to beat around the bush, the market has softened,’ Ali Sajwani the general manager of operations told The National. ‘There is a large oversupply problem, continuous dumping by certain companies into the market, which is not healthy for the market. Prices have come down, yields have come down and the market has suffered.’”
“In today’s housing market, both sellers and buyers are bombarded with a variety of often mixed messages on pricing their homes to sell, or an array of bargains at reduced prices. While the residential property market in South Africa remains active, there’s no doubt that it remains mainly a buyer’s market, says Dr Andrew Golding, chief executive of the Pam Golding Property group. ‘Sellers who are able to wait for trading conditions to improve, are better advised to take their homes off the market. A reduction in the volume of properties listed would also go some way towards stabilising the market so that the normal forces of supply and demand are at play, rather than an overweighting of stock on the market,’ Golding said.”
“Owing to the financial crisis and the slowdown in the real estate sector, residential projects worth around $66 billion are facing bankruptcy proceedings, a recent survey said. ‘In the current scenario, it is the residential real estate segment that presents the maximum amount of stressed assets. India’s residential sector has been reeling under the pressure of delayed/stalled projects with 4.54 lakh units running behind their completion dates,’ the agency said.”
“Tenant-friendly suburbs in Melbourne’s pricey rental market have been revealed, with new data showing the neighbourhoods where renters have plenty of choice and don’t have to battle rising costs. In Southbank, the glut of apartments meant renters had their pick of the bunch, Dixon Kestles director John Pratt said. ‘From time to time we get people coming to us saying, ‘My property’s been on the market for a few weeks and it’s not renting,’ and we look at it and we find out it’s overpriced,’ he said. ‘If an agent is doing their job, they’ll be communicating with their client and they will bring the price down.”
“‘The only force that can defeat China is from within. No exterior force can.’ On October 2 this year, the Communist Party’s leading journal of political theory, Qiushi, published in full a 2018 speech by President Xi Jinping, highlighting in stark language China’s coming challenges as the People’s Republic enters its 71st year. Indeed, in 2020, China’s primary economic risk is most likely to come not from the trade war, but from its inflated property market.”
“‘Black swans’ and ‘grey rhinos’ dominated China’s financial lexicon this year. Few in the population know what they are but most know what they mean. They mean fear. China’s property market is the grey rhino, overfed on massive liquidity steroids. One injection was the massive stimulus introduced in response to the 2008 global financial crisis. Another injection was from the six consecutive interest rate cuts in the 12 months to November 2015. Awash in liquidity, Chinese stock markets took off too, but by late 2015, the bubble had burst and the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index tumbled about 50 per cent from its 2015 peak. Real estate, however, partied on.”
“Zhongnanhai’s worst economic nightmare is a Japan-style collapse. Despite Xi’s caution that ‘houses are for living in, not for speculation,’ China’s real-estate market value has risen to twice the size of the G7 economies combined. At US$65 trillion, it is almost five times China’s GDP in 2018, and more than 10 times China’s stock market capitalisation. In 2019, China’s property bubble is being pricked – on both the supply and demand sides.”
“Since 2017, conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group, the flagship of billionaire Wang Jianlin, has dumped US$25 billion in assets to keep afloat. More recently, major developer Soho China is looking to sell all core commercial properties in Beijing and Shanghai worth US$8.5 billion. The grey rhino is panicking. Trade conflicts can always be addressed by recalibrating global trading routes over time. But China’s economic dream will be over if its property bubble bursts, Japan-style. All bubbles come to an end; the question for China is when and how.”