A report from Go Banking Rates. “The Florida cities on this list are showing alarming signs that could be pointing toward a housing crisis. Pembroke Pines, Florida: % of homes for sale that have been foreclosed: 74.47%. Hollywood, Florida: % of homes for sale that have been foreclosed: 63.41%. Nearly half of Jacksonville’s homes for sale are foreclosed — 1,706 out of 3,664 homes. The rental vacancy rate is at 6.6%. Miami is also showing some alarming signs, with nearly 70% of homes for sale being foreclosed, which translates to 3,010 out of 4,317. The rental vacancy rate is at 6.7%. Gainesville has the highest rental vacancy rate on this list, at 15.9%. Additionally, 21.28% of homes for sale have been foreclosed, foretelling a possible market drop.”
“Fort Lauderdale is also working with an inventory of houses for sale that are more than 50% foreclosed, or 463 out of 874 homes. In addition to rising cases of mortgage delinquency, the homeowner vacancy rate is rising, and the rental vacancy rate is climbing to 7%. People are starting to leave Orlando, spiking the vacancy rates for both renters and homeowners. The number of homes for sale that have been foreclosed is also perilously close to 50%, or 1,226 out of 2,538 homes.”
From News 4 Jax. “GoBankingRates pulled data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Consumer Protection Bureau, and RealtyTrac and reviewed the percentage of mortgages that are delinquent and renter vacancy rates. Local realtors, however, said the data doesn’t paint a full picture of the North Florida market. Howard Flaschen with Round Table Realty doesn’t agree with Jacksonville’s rankings, noting that pre-foreclosures were considered in the data, which aren’t necessarily an indicator of what could happen in the future.”
“‘Someone may have been late on a payment. Or we’re negotiating with a bank for a forbearance or a loan modification or maybe they were even doing a refinance out of a HELOC and missed the payment or late payment, it’s going to be paid off at closing that shows up on many of the portal websites because they just do it in an automated fashion. A box gets checked somewhere it shows up as a pre-foreclosure,’ Flaschen said.”
Arlington Now in Virginia. “The average net sold to original ask dropped from a March peak of 105.9% to 96.6% in August. I suspect that once September-November listings close and we can start filling in those fields, we’ll see that number fall further but maybe not significantly because asking prices have started to react to weaker market conditions and many sellers are coming off their expectations for spring 2022 prices. I shared some detailed thoughts last month in a column addressing price drops in Arlington and the TL;DR version is that 1) yes prices have dropped relative to their peak this spring, 2) there’s not nearly enough data available locally to say with any statistical confidence how much that drop has been, and 3) my observation was/is that market-wide in Arlington we’ve lost most/all of the appreciation we saw in the first 4-5 months of 2022.”
KTNV in Nevada. “The Las Vegas housing market is experiencing a significant downward shift when compared to where it was at the beginning of this year. Andrew Smith, President of the Las Vegas-based Home Builders Research says the number of homes sold in October has gone down by 59% from the same month in 2021. He says builders are slowing down and just trying to play catch up…hoping to sell their increasing inventory of buyer-less homes. Smith says, builders just need to sell.”‘
“‘The owner of the lots losing money, so they’re trying to get rid of them as fast as they can. Same for a home builder. If they finish that house and it’s just sitting there without a buyer, they’re losing money,’ said Smith.”
The Vermont Digger. “The doubling of interest rates over the past year is affecting construction and the real estate market across Vermont in different ways. In Rutland, real estate agent Joshua Lemieux said he is no longer seeing offers of 30% to 35% above the asking price, as he did last year. In Bennington, interest rates appear to be having an impact, according to real estate agent Lilli West. She said she sees this especially with regard to investors, who had made Bennington the focus of tremendous real estate activity in 2021. ‘It’s really dried up the investors,’ West said. Because they are being scared away by rising interest rates, they are no longer competing against first-time home buyers, and those buyers have an easier time now, West said.”
The Register Star. “A typical Winnebago County home listed for $159,900 in October, down 3% from the previous month’s $164,800. Across metro Rockford, median home prices fell to $172,500, down 8% from a month earlier.”
From Mansion Global. “An Austin compound that was once the priciest listing in Texas is back on the market with a whopping $10 million price cut. The megamansion sitting on 21 acres overlooking Lake Travis was first listed in April for $45 million, according to listing records. The listing was removed just a month later, and returned to the market last week. The property last traded in 2018, when it was listed for $13.5 million. Texas is a non-disclosure state, thus Mansion Global could not determine the final price.”
The Sacramento Bee in California. “The median price in Placer County was flat, according to the state realtor group, and prices were down 1.4% in Sacramento. Yolo, Yuba and Sutter all saw October price drops of around 6% compared to September. Statewide, the median sale price for a single-family home was $801,190 in October, down 2.5% over September and just a few thousand dollars higher than it was in October 2021.”
The Daily Journal in California. “It may finally be a buyer’s market in San Mateo County as sales for single-family residential homes fell 18% to 296 from September to October, according to the San Mateo County Association of Realtors. Compass Real Estate Realtor Raziel Ungar said it’s becoming a buyer’s market because there are more sellers than buyers. Homes are also on the market for longer, giving buyers more leverage. ‘The sellers want to sell their house at the price from six months ago, or they are just backing out altogether,’ said Ungar. ‘People are in a cautious wait-and-see mode right now. Even though prices are down 10-15% from six months ago, because of interest rates, the mortgage would still be more expensive than if you bought six months ago.’”
“The median sale price for single-family home prices in October was $1.81 million and in comparison in October 2021 median sale price was $1.91 million, according to SAMCAR data. ‘It’s fair to say that median single-family home prices are about where they were in July and August of last year,’ said Ungar. But Ungar said October was the quietest month for sales he’s seen in years.
Multi-Housing News. “The SFR/BTR market has grown and changed substantially from a development perspective, too. The early leaders in this space included big, national homebuilders like Toll Brothers, D.R. Horton and Lennar, or as Alex Pollack, director of partnerships atMosaic puts it, ‘companies which already had multifamily subsidiaries and could pull these two operations together and be successful in the arena.’ Now, storm clouds are gathering, brought on by the dimming economic prospects. ‘From October 2021 to October 2022, the ability to raise capital went from one of the easiest to the most difficult in a six-to-nine-month period,’ Mitch Rotta, senior managing director at TruAmerica Multifamily.”
“Rotta depicted recession as a ‘painful moment,’ which will subject those in the SFR market to the first real headwinds. ‘A lot of smaller groups that were formed over the last two years will not make it.’ The slowdown in activity will be accompanied by a cleansing of the fringe players, location and product. ‘There are a lot of mediocre SFR players and, frankly, bad and poorly located communities that got built, and that type of activity needs to clear out of the sector,’ said Mark Wolf, CEO of AHV Communities.”
The Globe and Mail. “The Bank of Canada reported a $522-million third-quarter loss on Tuesday, the first time the central bank has lost money in its 87-year history. The normally profitable Crown corporation has been caught in a loss-making bind in recent months. After massively expanding its balance sheet during the pandemic, then racing to increase interest rates to fight inflation, the central bank is now paying more interest on its liabilities than it’s earning on its assets. This is the first in what is expected to be a stretch of quarterly losses, as the bank does not anticipate returning to profitability until 2024 or 2025.”
From CBC News. “Mortgage brokers say homeowners with variable-rate mortgages will be squeezed even further next week, as the Bank of Canada is widely expected to raise the country’s key lending rate. Now that interest rates are rising, and home prices are falling, many homeowners who bought at the market’s peak have found themselves questioning whether they made the right choice. In London, Ont., the average price of a home has fallen for eight months to roughly $640,000 in October, down from the market’s peak of about $825,000 in February.”
“‘It’s tough,’ said Mark Mitchell, a London, Ont., mortgage broker with Real Mortgage Associates. ‘Rates have gone sky-high.’ ‘The prime rate is 3.75 and the inflation rate is seven. Historically, the prime rate is supposed to be higher than inflation. Now I don’t think they’re going to go that far, but they still have a ways to go. All signs point to it’s going to get worse before it gets better.’”
“Mitchell said he’s advising borrowers with a variable rate mortgage to lock in now to avoid even more pain down the road, but if a client can’t afford to lock in because the payments are too high, he said it might be time to consider selling. ‘I’m already seeing a lot of anticipatory selling because it’s too high for them to lock in,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of pain out there. It’s been a lot of tough conversations as of late, that’s for sure.’”
ABC Business. “It’s known as the ‘COVID housing boom’: Australia’s house and unit prices went wild as the pandemic set in. But data reveals some suburbs’ prices have slid back from peak levels earlier this year, with some showing double digit falls and a return to levels below March 2020 when the pandemic hit. Sydney and Melbourne have a list of suburbs with house and unit values now below those recorded at the beginning of COVID-19, CoreLogic data shows. Brisbane also, ever so slightly, makes the list.”
“Eliza Owen, CoreLogic’s head of research, expects price falls to deepen, with 2023 to have some ‘headwinds and tailwinds for the housing market. I think yes, we’ve got further to go with this downswing,’ she said. ‘There was a lot of purchasing done on low fixed rates through the pandemic, with fixed finance comprising around 46 per cent of new lending, and much of that lending will be rolling onto higher mortgage rates in the next 6–12 months.’”
Vietnam Express. “Many apartment projects in Vietnam have stalled due to lack of funds caused by credit tightening and higher interest rates, leaving buyers in trouble. Thao, a migrant worker, has been waiting for three years for an apartment at the D’s Gold building in HCMC’s Binh Tan District. She has paid VND700 million ($28,226), or 70% of the apartment’s cost, so far but found construction has come to a standstill over the past year. She said: ‘The apartment I visited last year and this year looks the same. The same wall, the same ceiling, the same floor. No more construction. No improvement.’ Due to the stalled project, she has to keep renting a house for VND4.5 million a month.”
“She and a dozen of other apartment buyers have taken blankets, mosquito nets and food to the construction site and are carrying on a live-in protest against the developer. ‘We have paid for our apartments, but are now begging for them.’ Hang has paid for an apartment of nearly 50 square meters costing VND780 million at D’s Gold using bank loans. ‘I have to pay the bank nearly VND3 million interest a month.’ Two years after she started paying, she still has to rent a room in a boarding house for VND1.5 million.”
“Many buyers at the Kingsway apartment project in the city’s Binh Tan District are in the same situation. Thanh, who has paid some 70% of the price, said construction has more or less stalled since the pandemic began. The veteran, who has lost an eye, said: ‘Apartments have not been painted yet. Entrances have not been built yet. Weeds have grown everywhere.’”
From Business Insider. “Sam Bankman-Fried said he has ‘no idea’ the status of his personal finances after FTX’s collapse. ‘I had $100,000 in my bank account last I checked,’ the former CEO told Axios. ‘Am I allowed to say a negative number?’ he told the outlet. ‘I mean, I have no idea. I don’t know. I had $100,000 in my bank account last I checked.’”
“Bankman-Fried’s finances, lifestyle, and sponsorships have come under intense scrutiny amid the collapse of FTX. While he was known for a simple lifestyle including cruising around in a Toyota Corolla and practicing effective altruism, he also channeled money into high-profile corporate sponsorships including naming rights for Miami Heat’s arena.”