A report from Domain News on Australia. "A regulation-led slowdown saw the city’s median house price drop $76,616 in the year to September, the latest Domain House Price Report shows. Almost half of the drop was in the past quarter. 'Sydney buyers and sellers are now operating in a housing market with prices at late-2016 levels,' said Domain senior research analyst Nicola Powell."

"Sydney’s median house price is now at $1,101,532, down 8.1 per cent since the market peak in mid-2017. By comparison, prices have surged 89.1 per cent over the previous six years. While the downturn had seen vendors’ profits take a hit, Yellow Brick Road executive chairman Mark Bouris said it was the market restructure Sydney needed to have."

"'What was needed was not so much a price correction, but to take the euphoric nature of the market down … we had to slow it down. There was too much hype in it,' he said."

"Falling prices are bad news for some but are of course good news for others, including Gabriella and Jacob Princi-Kinchella. They recently bought a five-bedroom house in Denistone for $1.61 million, weeks after it passed in at auction.'

"The couple bought the property for $115,000 below the advertised sale price. 'When we went and inspected it there were only ever two or three other parties there,' Mrs Princi-Kinchella said. 'After four weeks I think [the owner] realised they weren’t going to get what they wanted.'"

The Canadian Press. "Sales of luxury homes in two of Canada’s most expensive cities fell this year, as the high-end real estate market continued to feel the impact of foreign buyers taxes. Realty brokerage Re/Max says sales of single-detached homes priced from $1 million to $2 million fell 35 per cent from a year ago in both Toronto and Vancouver."

"According to the annual report, sales of single-detached homes in the $2-million to $3-million range were down 50 per cent in Toronto and 22 per cent in Vancouver. Meanwhile, homes that were sold for more than $3 million dropped 44 per cent in Toronto and 45 per cent in Vancouver."

"'All the new rules that the government implemented, along with the foreign buyers tax and the new lending regulations, it all just put a crunch on the most expensive part of the market,' said Christopher Alexander, regional director of Re/Max Integra’s Ontario-Atlantic business."

The Press and Journal in Scotland. "Since the 1970s the fortunes of the Aberdeen’s property market have closely followed that of the oil and gas industry due to the scale of employment the energy sector brings in buoyant times. But over the past four years, house prices in the city have been steadily dropping, with a surplus of properties now on the market."

"Robert Fraser, a senior property partner at Aberdein Considine, believes the current market is the best property buyers have experienced in close to 20 years. 'Since the oil price crash of 2014, when the Brent Crude benchmark dropped to under $30, the average transaction value in the Granite City has fallen considerably,' Robert said."

"'The average house price this year between January and September was under £180,000, down 15% on the peak four years ago, and this is likely to drop further before year-end,' he said. 'At the peak in 2004 there were around 3,000 properties on the market at any given time. Today that number sits at over 6,000, creating a buyers’ market where properties are changing hands for below home report value in many cases.'"

From This Is Money in the UK. "Chancellor Philip Hammond will unveil the Government's fiscal plans on Monday next week. Last year, he scrapped stamp duty for first-time buyers but there was little solace for those further up the housing ladder, many of whom feel trapped in their homes because of the increasingly extortionate cost of moving."

"With just five days to go, reader Chris Healy put down her predicament in writing for Mr Hammond to consider. It is in full below."

"Dear Chancellor, I need your help — as I suspect do thousands of others. And if you help us, then we may end up helping you. So it's a win-win. My problem, you see, is I'd like to downsize: first my home and then, later, my job."

"I am no shirker, but I'm coming up to 67 and have been working full-time for almost 50 years, so part-time hours are starting to have a greater appeal. I've tried twice now to sell my house and have failed — and lost a fair bit of money in the process."

"The first time, 18 months ago, the cash buyer, had agreed to pay £1million (this is the expensive South-East we're talking about) plus £43,750 in stamp duty. We'd almost reached exchange of contracts when he stopped responding. I paid my solicitor's bill, chalked it down to experience and moved on. Not literally, of course."

"The second time, just two weeks ago, on the day before I was signing my sale contract, this time selling for £945,000, the buyers reduced their offer price by £50,000. Nice. I offered a £10,000 reduction but they remained firm and the whole deal went pear-shaped."

"The result is that I now have more legal fees to pay and — if I don't find another buyer pretty quickly — I will lose the deposit on my intended home on a new development. I can't say punitive stamp duty charges alone are to blame for these sales falling though — but they mean there are far fewer buyers interested to begin with."

"At £945,000 — the perfectly realistic agreed price on my five-bedroom house plus annexe — stamp duty land tax adds £38,250 to the buyers' costs. That's an enormous amount for any normal family to find, and it means more people are deciding to stay put."

"Buyers will often stretch themselves financially to achieve a bigger family home, but the huge stamp duty charge makes it a stretch too far. It's the upsizers who need some help. Without it, the market will remain clogged, with our inability to sell and move, and eventually stagnate. In my road of 20 houses, four of us would-be downsizers have tried to sell in past 18 months — without success."

"Nor do I think I was being unrealistic in my sale price. This time around, I'd asked for £975,000 and accepted my buyers' offer of £945,000. They were a big family, and the deal would have allowed them to stop 'wasting' more than £2,500 a month on rent while I could have paid off my still-large mortgage and moved to a slightly cheaper area."

"I was so optimistic this time that half my possessions were already packed in boxes. I was buying new, from Berkeley Homes, and we were under pressure to complete by October 31."

"Anyway, it's a buyers' market, it seems, and I may have to content myself with unpacking the boxes and staying here for a while longer."