A report from the Wall Street Journal on New York. “Manhattan landlords are pulling unrented apartments off the market at an unusually elevated rate, tightening inventory while rents are low and, in some neighborhoods, still falling. Building owners removed 1,814 apartment listings in Manhattan last month, according to UrbanDigs. That’s more than three times the number of apartments landlords removed from the market in February of 2020.”
“Reduced demand for Manhattan apartments during the pandemic sent median rental prices down more than 17% for the year ending in December, according to a report from appraisal firm Miller Samuel and real-estate brokerage Douglas Elliman. Rent concessions of up to 25% off the previous year’s rent have become common at luxury buildings, and tenants say they have more negotiating power in new leases than they ever had before.”
The Seattle Times in Washington. “Seattle may not be dying, as the saying goes. But it could be doing something we haven’t seen in decades around here: shrinking. Whether it was the pandemic, the protests and riots, the urban decay, the high costs, the work-from-home trend or pick your reason, people appear to have ditched the Emerald City last year in unusually large numbers, new data shows.”
“This winter I’ve been seeing apartment rental ads, especially downtown and in South Lake Union, offering crazy deals like ’12 weeks free, plus 6 months of free parking!’ The city feels a little emptier, due to the pandemic, and the ads suggest it isn’t an illusion. So I asked the U.S. Postal Service to make a comparison: How many people moved in and out of Seattle in our horrible year 2020, versus the year before?”
“The net migration out of the city was more than 26,000 households. In a city with about 351,000 households, that’s a big change, a potential decline of 7%. It’s how you get 12-weeks-free deals for apartments. The San Francisco Chronicle looked at USPS address data and found an even bigger net migration out of that city — a decline of more than 50,000 households.”
The Tahoe Daily Tribune. “‘There is plenty of housing in the basin, they are just sitting empty,’ said Sabrina Belleci, broker and owner of ReMax North Lake Tahoe. ‘Over 70% are sitting empty.’ Many of the empty houses are secondary houses or short term rentals.”
The National Post in Canada. “The vacancy rate for newer purpose-built rental apartments in the City of Toronto increased to 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020, up from 1.1 per cent in the same quarter a year earlier, according to Urbanation Inc. Average rents in this category dipped 10 percent over the same period to $2,337. The glut of small condo apartments roughly 500 square feet in size, a large portion of which functioned as Airbnb ghost hotels, is weighing heavily on the Toronto market.”
“A provincial crackdown on Airbnb forced as many as 18,000 such units to switch from short- to long-term rental in the first half of 2020. Many are still sitting empty and the situation is not likely to improve much post-pandemic with continued tighter controls over Airbnb. Says broker Justin Ditkofsky, ‘The market became insane to the point where anything that was built sold. As a result, developers began building small because they could charge more per square foot. COVID has flipped that thinking on its head.’”
From Reuters. “The COVID-19 pandemic has achieved what many mayors across Europe have tried and failed to do: wipe out tens of thousands of Airbnbs from city centers and so help lower rental costs for locals, in some places by as much as 15%. ‘If tourism had come back faster, maybe I wouldn’t have taken this decision. But I can’t go another year without a clear sense of when money is coming in,’ said Vanessa Rola, 40, who was renting four apartments in Lisbon’s Graça district on travel platforms including Airbnb. Without tourists, she couldn’t pay her own rent, and is in the process of ending her contracts.”
“In Prague, Airbnb listings tumbled from just over 14,500 to less than 8,000, according to Inside Airbnb. Rents have fallen by around 8%, real estate developer Trigema reported. ‘I was losing $20,000 a month, and regulation was making things very complicated,’ said Ondrej, a landlord in Prague who has sold his two Airbnb flats and given up the three he was renting to sublet. ‘The Airbnb boom is over.’”
The Wentworth Courier in Australia. “The luxury Bellevue Hill mansion of an apartment developer that collapsed owing creditors more than $560m has been put up for March 27 auction. The four-bedroom residence is in the name of William O’Dwyer, sole director of the Ralan Group, and his wife. Ralan, which had high-rise projects in Sydney and the Gold Coast, entered voluntary administration in August 2019 owing creditors more than $560m.”
“Last March, it went into liquidation when an agreement between O’Dwyer and about 1600 apartment buyers, who are owed about $230m, was terminated. Channel 9’s A Current Affair had showed footage of creditors shouting ‘cheater, cheater’ and ‘shut the f— up’ as O’Dwyer had proposed his rescue plan — which didn’t come off — to 700 creditors at the Wesley conference Centre in Sydney.”
“Last January, O’Dwyer told The Australian he was ‘very sad’ for the distress caused and that he’d work tirelessly until creditors were repaid. He said then he’d have to sell his heavily mortgaged Bellevue Hill mansion.”