It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “Coshocton County is low on housing in a lot of key areas with a need for more construction. Phil Hunt recently sold his mother’s condominium, part of The Oaks subdivision, after she moved to an assisted living facility. Hunt said they purposely set the original price a little high knowing it’s easier to come down than it is to go up as a seller. ‘My thoughts were we had the ability that we didn’t need to rush. We had a little bit of time for the market to play itself out. We didn’t feel like we needed to take the very first offer we received and knew we purposely baked in some negotiating room in it,’ Hunt said. ‘We were serious about this. We weren’t just going to give it away, but we wanted to be fair.’”
“Michael Jordan‘s house in the northern Chicago suburb Highland Park has resurfaced on the market for close to half the price it initially listed for in 2012. The price, according to Zillow, is listed at $14.8 million. The home was initially listed for $29 million in 2012. The last time the property was listed, according to Zillow’s history alone, was in February 2021. The property taxes on the property are around $148,000 annually.”
“Craig Lipaj is almost finished with remodeling his bathroom. It’s a project that stemmed from a leaky roof caused by damage from Hurricane Ian. After a long battle for a fair settlement with his insurance company, he finally got his roof replaced, but it took a year and a half to complete. The damage from the storm is still prevalent in his North Port neighborhood. Multiple homes are finally getting repairs after wrangling with insurance companies. ‘If you have a claim, it’s a battle’ Lipaj said. ‘You’re going to fight it long and hard for a year or two years. Plus, there’s people who still don’t have claims settled.’ Many homeowners are also concerned about possible disputes with an insurance claim. In December 2022, state lawmakers passed legislation that requires claimants to pay their own attorney’s fees.”
“The unfinished, 1.4M SF Oceanwide Plaza in Downtown Los Angeles could be up for auction as soon as Sept. 17. In its present state, the project at 1101 S. Flower St. has been appraised at $434M, according to The Real Deal. The development, three towers reaching as high as 49 stories, is expected to cost at least $865M to finish, TRD reported. China Oceanwide Holdings, the parent company of the LLC developing the project, had previously estimated spending more than $1B to finish construction on top of the $1.2B it had already spent to get the project where it is today.”
“Oceanwide owes its creditors, including EB-5 investors, contractors that worked on the project and the county assessor, more than $400M. Lendlease, the general contractor on the project, and others forced the developer into bankruptcy in February. Lendlease announced in May that it would exit all of its U.S. and UK construction projects. It’s unclear who would be the buyer pool for such a large-scale project, especially one that’s been at least partly left open to the elements since construction paused four years ago and has more recently attracted graffiti artists.”
“Things aren’t looking great for downtown’s 1.7 million-square-foot Research and Development District from San Diego-based life science real estate developer IQHQ. A Citi analyst, writing in a research note to the project’s publicly traded lender Bank OZK, believes the district is 0 percent leased and that pharmaceutical giants have rejected the project and downtown location. Some experts have suggested the whole ‘biotech downtown’ thing isn’t happening and IQHQ should pivot to regular office space, not life sciences. Q: Should IQHQ switch to general office space, not life sciences?”
“Ray Major, SANDAG: YES: Downtown is woefully overbuilt in terms of office space right now. If IQHQ cannot secure the life science businesses they need, then they should pivot to a market that could generate tenants. However, moving into the general office space market may not favor them because many buildings have high vacancy rates and more businesses with expiring leases will most likely take fewer square feet in their renewals due to telecommuting.”
“Non-bank financial institutions pose an increasing risk to America’s big banks, the Federal Reserve said on Thursday in a post on the Fed’s Liberty Street Economics blog. During times of heightened market-wide stress, demands for liquidity mount on banks as non-banks seek term loans and lines of credit. This escalating reliance on big banks could result in ‘vectors of shock transmission and amplification, forcing authorities to intervene and do so en masse,’ the Fed said in the post, adding that the extent of these market disruptions ‘could be rather severe.’”
“A flood of listings in many Canadian housing markets is giving buyers who can qualify their pick of the litter and is forcing some sellers to get creative to land a deal. A glut of condos in Toronto, for example, means some sellers have to pull out unorthodox strategies to land one of the few prospective buyers in the market. ‘People are definitely more open to getting creative in order to get that condo sold, because right now, the condo market, it’s crickets,’ Davelle Morrison, a real estate agent in Toronto. Even if buyers aren’t showing up in most Canadian cities, sellers certainly are. At the start of this month, there were roughly 175,000 active property listings across Canada, up 28.4 per cent year-over-year, according to CREA.”
“The condo market in Metro Vancouver is also facing a slowdown, with sales for apartment-style homes down nearly 23 per cent year-over-year in May, according to the local real estate board. Active listings for condo units in Toronto are at or near record highs right now, notes John Pasalis, president of Realosophy Realty. He adds that if listings continue to rise in Toronto, some sellers might get impatient and take a steeper cut on price to win over buyers in the market, putting some downward pressure on home values. Pasalis says that a lot of the sellers in Toronto’s condo market right now are investors, many of whom are unable to raise rents to keep cash flow positive in the face of still-high borrowing costs. ‘Inventory builds up and then you start getting one or two sellers just throwing in the towel, saying, ‘You know what, I don’t want to wait any longer for this price. Let’s just unload it,’ Pasalis says.”
“A businessman shot dead in an altercation with a former client on Monday victimized hundreds of people through myriad enterprises that sparked three major police operations, netted at least $100-million and triggered dozens of lawsuits, according to interviews and court records. For all that, Arash Missaghi seemed immune from consequence. His voluminous court records show no convictions, no jail time and no successful lawsuits against him in Canada, while providing few – if any – indications why criminal charges against him were withdrawn on multiple occasions. His streak of impunity ended on Monday afternoon when one of his alleged victims, Alan Kats, penned a suicide note before confronting Mr. Missaghi at his Toronto office. A subsequent triple shooting left Mr. Missaghi and an associate, Samira Yousefi, dead. Mr. Kats took his own life, according to his widow.”
“‘I shake the system and change it and evolve people so everyone and every lawyer across the nation follows the new pattern,’ he wrote in a 2018 e-mail message that was reproduced in a legal judgment. He made it all work with ample doses of intimidation. ‘Stealing from a person like me is like stealing from Al Capone …’ Mr. Missaghi said in a 2018 text message filed in a civil case. ‘I don’t allow it to happen. And when it happens I can’t allow for it to be taken. … There will be no mercy and no holding back.’”
“A group of insolvent, out-of-town landlords are alleged to have spent millions of investors’ money on luxury items and extravagant expenses — flying on private jets, staying in luxurious hotels and racking up a $5,000 tab at a Miami strip club, among other things — even as their struggling real estate business was freefalling into a state of financial turmoil. That’s one of the revelations brought to light by KSV Advisory, the court-appointed monitor overseeing insolvency proceedings involving 11 corporations that entered bankruptcy protection last year after falling $144 million into debt to numerous lenders. The landlords collectively own 632 rental units across Ontario, including the Sault, Sudbury and Timmins. In all, 456 of those rental units are occupied, generating an average of more than half a million dollars in gross monthly rent collections.”
“The monitor expressed ‘serious concerns’ about continued borrowing from investors — in part to finance interest payments on previous debt — and transfers to both the landlords and their affiliated companies. The monitor found the applicants continued to borrow funds and renew loans ‘when they knew or ought to have known that there was no reasonable chance of repaying them,’ the report said. ‘Despite that knowledge, the applicants appeared willing to borrow more to pay interest on prior debt obligations.’ In one instance, a loan was renewed on a property in the Sault’s downtown core that had already been sold without the investors’ knowledge. In another instance, two loans were renewed after a property in Timmins had burned down, said the monitor.”
“The CoreLogic NZ June Housing Chart Pack shows that a 9.2 percent annual increase in sales activity in May was still significantly below normal sales volumes. ‘This relatively quiet market in terms of sales activity means new listings coming to market are adding to the overall inventory, putting buyers in the box seat when it comes to negotiating prices,’ CoreLogic NZ chief property economist Kelvin Davidson said. ‘New listings activity has been solid although not spectacular so far in 2024, and it would appear that some ‘pent up’ reluctance to list in the final few months of last year is now coming forward and turning into available stock this year. Data suggests that values have been losing momentum since March and the patchy recovery that many areas of New Zealand had been experiencing has slowed, or in some cases reversed.’”
“Struggling homeowners are increasingly hitting the pricey reset button on their loans in the hope of dragging down their monthly repayments. It’s adding years to the length of their loans and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest costs. A recent Finder.com.au survey revealed one in eight mortgage holders polled revealed they had extended their home loan to lower their repayments over the last year. In a trend described as ‘borrowers stuck in mortgage quicksand,’ about half of those who had extended their loans had added more than five years to the life of the debt. Finder’s Consumer Sentiment Tracker revealed 36 per cent of Australians struggled to pay their home loan in May 2024 – up from 24 per cent in May 2022.”
“New analysis showed paying off the average Australian loan of $625,050 over 30 years would make $722,602 interest payable. This assumed an interest rate of 5.99 per cent, one of the cheaper rates currently on offer. Pushing this out to 35 years would add $147,457 extra to the total interest over the life of the loan. Finder home loans expert Richard Whitten said the move was a drastic measure. ‘While it will reduce their monthly repayments in the short term it will likely cost them a fortune over the long run,’ he said.”
“Old apartment prices in Hanoi are showing signs of cooling following several months of shocking hikes. Recent surveys indicate that apartment prices in the capital city have tended to decrease in the past month. After the Lunar New Year (Tet) 2024, which fell in February, the prices of old apartments in districts surrounding downtown Hanoi soared 35-40%. Bac Thuy Hong, a resident in Thanh Xuan district, said that after Tet, her family were looking for an apartment of about 80 square meters for VND2.8-3 billion ($117,873) in Thanh Xuan district. However, the price offered at that time was too high, about VND3.5-4 billion ($157,165), so they decided to wait for the price to drop.”
“‘From late April to early May, I saw apartment prices falling rapidly to pre-Tet levels, and I was able to find an apartment for a suitable price,’ she said. According to property website Batdongsan.com.vn, since the end of April, searches for Hanoi apartments have plunged by 40% compared to the peak in March. At some projects that were handed over, transactions fell sharply in April to only half of that in the previous two months.”