A report from WPTV in Florida. “The large selling off of homes owned by Zillow is also happening on the Treasure Coast. As many as 20 homes in St. Lucie County are listed on the Zillow website. Earlier this week, 30 Zillow-owned homes were up for sale, some at prices less than what the company paid to buy the homes. ‘I think this signals they have a lot of information about the peak of the housing market,’ said real estate expert Ken H. Johnson. ‘You do not want to be buying when housing prices are about to flatten out or go down.’”
The Center Square Illinois. “Zillow’s online house-flipping unit has turned into an embarrassing flop, forcing the real estate company to flee the business, cut its workforce, and dump thousands of its properties onto the market. ‘Zestimates are inaccurate because they don’t know our local market,’ said Kindi Bliss, a real estate agent in Bloomington-Normal. ‘Now the public thinks they are accurate, but the realtors know and laugh all the time at Zestimates.’”
The Post and Courier in South Carolina. “While still robust, the housing market in the Midlands has cooled a bit from the feverish heights of earlier in the year, according to the S.C. Realtors Association. Homes that have been on the market for a while are having to trim back on prices that have been too ambitious, said Jill Moylan, owner of Home Advantage Realty. ‘The sky is not really the limit,’ Moylan said.
“Brad Allen, CEO of The Art of Real Estate, has seen some properties have to come down from being overpriced. ‘You are starting to see some sellers get pinched,’ Allen said. The feverish bidding for homes has cooled a bit too, he said. A home that would quickly attract 10 offers when it hit the market might get just two now, Allen said.”
The Portsmouth Herald in New Hampshire. “A lack of inventory, coupled with some buyer fatigue, contributed to fewer sales of single-family homes and residential condominiums in Rockingham County in October. The price of a house also dipped compared to recent months, but the $500,050 median price still put a home in the county above the half-million-dollar mark for the sixth month in a row. The median price of a condo, according to the NHAR data, was $369,500 for the month, well below the high-water mark of $405,000 recorded in July.”
“According to John Rice, a broker in Rye, sellers need to price their property correctly and not over-price it. ‘As always, it boils down to price,’ he said. ‘Where property is priced to the market, there is going to be strong interest, and there are still going to be multiple offers and a short marketing time. Where a property is clearly overpriced, buyers are probably more sensitive to this and property sits.’”
Hawaii Public Radio. “The median sales price for a single-family home on Maui cooled to $933,000 in October — down from $997,000 the month before. It has not been this low since February, when the median sales price was $895,000. The median sales price for a condo in Maui County was $673,000 in October, down from nearly $730,000 in September.”
The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. “The Property Council is warning Melbourne will remain a ghost town as construction of office towers continues apace while workers are reluctant to return to the CBD. Melbourne is at 4 per cent of its pre-COVID office occupancy levels and City of Melbourne data shows foot traffic has been down 80 per cent during the pandemic. One in five stores in the CBD was vacant last month.”
“However, many office buildings are under construction, with the city set to deliver more than 222,000 square metres of office space in the second half of this year – half of all new office space in Australia. Victorian Property Council executive director Danni Hunter said Melbourne’s CBD had been a ghost town for the better part of two years and office occupancy had returned to 45 per cent only between lockdowns, which was not enough to support businesses in the CBD.”
“‘From a purely economic sense, one office worker supports five other CBD jobs from all of your associated services, baristas, hospitality workers. All of those guys are really reliant on the presence of office workers,’ she said. ‘Without the presence of office workers … the structural and economic impact on the CBD will be quite profound.’”
From CNBC TV 18. “It seems like the problems of China’s real estate market are just beginning—from rising debt levels of real estate developers to declining home sales. Since Evergrande’s default, at least four developers have defaulted on payments.The market has enjoyed a relentless journey to the moon over the few years, with prices rising higher and investors chasing deals regardless.”
“In March, 288 apartments in new Shenzen sold online in eight minutes. Similarly, buyers in Suzhou purchased 400 units just like that. The result? An asset bubble. Economists worried this bubble far eclipsed the one we saw in the United States housing sector back in the 2000s. To put this in perspective, at the peak of the US housing boom, investors put in $900 billion in a year. In a year ending in June in China, investors had invested some $1.4 trillion.”
“It would be wrong to say the market did not take a breather after the coronavirus outbreak. But it was just a breather. Urban housing prices in China were 5 percent higher in June 2020 year-on-year. But all this seems to be falling apart now. China’s international junk-bond market has borne the most brunt of this fallout. In the last six months, a sell-off in this market has wiped off a third of investors’ wealth.”
The Globe and Mail in Canada. “The path to Crystal City is a muddy all-terrain-vehicle trail that leads away from the ocean and deep into the woods. But Neil Partington, who keeps the key to unlock the chain at the entrance, doesn’t understand why anyone would want to go up there. In his view, this 2,850-acre plot isn’t good for much; it’s difficult to access, soggy and remote. When Chinese developer DongDu International (DDI) began buying this land on Nova Scotia’s eastern shore in 2014, announcing a grand vision for a resort called Crystal City, he and many other locals wondered why.”
“‘It’s just a huge chunk of useless bogland. Who would want to put a resort on that?’ said Mr. Partington, whose vegetable farm backs onto the property, which can only be accessed through his family’s land. ‘They didn’t even bother to build a road to get in there.’”
“Eight years ago, DDI had big plans to build luxury getaways for Chinese investors in this hard-to-reach corner of rural Nova Scotia. Central to the plans was a proposed vacation resort near the community of Indian Harbour Lake, with 1,000 villas, tennis courts, horse stables, swimming pools and replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Leaning Tower of Pisa.”
“The company promised billions of dollars in spending, and bought nine properties in Nova Scotia – including more than 3,300 acres in Guysborough County alone – totalling 6,500 acres across the province. DDI’s ideas were as ambitious as they were unusual, including docking two cruise ships in Halifax that would function as floating film studios. Almost none of it happened. Today, most of DDI’s land, including the site for Crystal City, is still undeveloped woodlots.”
“The DDI saga in Nova Scotia, with the grand promises the company made and then failed to fulfill, was an early warning sign for the problems now facing other large Chinese real estate companies and their holdings around the world. In 2016, Chinese buyers spent a record $3.9-billion on Canadian commercial property, according CRBE. By last year, that amount had plummeted to $181.5-million, a 95-per-cent drop.”
“Several major companies are struggling with large debt loads. They include Greenland Holding Group and China Aoyuan Group Ltd., which are both constructing condo skyscrapers in Toronto. Both have suffered multiple credit downgrades and today their debt is considered speculative, which will make it harder for them to raise funds.”
“‘For the folks who live here, it was so far-fetched, it seemed ridiculous,’ said Len Archibald, treasurer for the Port Hilford United Baptist Church, a whitewashed church near the proposed development. ‘It almost seemed too good to be true, and a little scary, to be honest.’”
“Jill Grant, a professor of planning at Dalhousie University, says the company’s plans for Crystal City were so out of touch with the realities of rural Nova Scotia they seemed doomed to fail. ‘The bigger question is how can politicians be so naive?’ Prof. Grant asked ‘I’ve never thought this was much more than a pipe dream. The scope of their project, and the location, never made much sense.’”
“Mr. Partington, the vegetable farmer in Guysborough County, said no one has asked for the key to access the DDI property behind his farm in more than four years. When he thinks about the Chinese company’s failed plans for his rural community, he just shrugs. ‘We’ve been promised a lot of things that never came. We’re still waiting on high-speed internet,’ he said.”