A report from Domain News in Australia. "Sydney’s weekend auction clearance rate slumped to a low of 44.5 per cent on Saturday. The result was Sydney’s lowest preliminary clearance rate in a decade, excluding public holiday long weekends. Danny Grant, of The Agency North, said realistic vendors were forgetting about last year’s surge in median house prices and reducing their asking prices by about 10 per cent to 2016 price levels."

"'This market is normalising,' he said. 'It is abnormal to have 10 or 12 people competing at an auction and prices that go hundreds of thousands of dollars over reserve.'"

"Buyer’s agent Amanda Bidder-Segers, of Amanda On My Side, said families looking to upgrade to a north shore home in the $4 million to $5 million range were buying at advantageous prices without much competition."

"'I say to my clients, ‘If we don’t find the right property, you don’t have to rush’,' she said. 'You don’t have that sick feeling of last year where, if you missed out on a home, you knew that the market was going up by $20,000 a week right in front of you.'"

The New Daily in Australia. "Sydney’s weekend clearance rate dropped to 44 per cent, according to Domain, with Melbourne not faring too much better at 48 per cent. Dr Andrew Wilson, at My Housing Market, advised the market had 'plunged to new depths' on Saturday in the toughest market conditions since the economic shock of the GFC."

"A rising crisis of confidence is now gripping markets with buyer and seller wariness,' he noted."

From Stuff New Zealand. "Christchurch's real estate market is nearing the end of another "slow but steady" year, leaving some in the industry to ponder an uncomfortable question: does the city have too many houses? In early 2017, Stuff reported on multi-unit properties sitting finished and unsold in suburban subdivisions. '[We] certainly won't be building any more of those,' construction boss Mike Greer said at the time."

"Speculative developments were the first to go. Management consultant Mike Blackburn monitors building activity in the city for his small and medium-sized builder clients. 'The golden goose is over,' Blackburn said, 'I wouldn't be advising anyone to be building large-scale spec houses at the moment because we just don't have the population for growth.'"

From Bloomberg on Canada. "It’s a product of one of the largest financial flows of the 21st century: The money being frenetically shuffled by millions of wealthy Chinese into safe assets abroad, in defiance of their country’s capital controls. Since mid-2014, capital flight from China may have totaled as much as $800 billion, according to estimates from the Institute of International Finance."

"In Vancouver, the tidal wave has wrought a dramatic economic, demographic, and physical transformation. Much of the money coming in has been legitimately earned, if sometimes extricated by gray-market means. But officials say that a substantial proportion is the proceeds of corruption or crime, including the illegal sale of opiates such as fentanyl."

"With public anger rising over astronomical housing prices and an economy distorted by wealthy outsiders, British Columbia’s left-leaning government—elected last year on a platform focused on calming the real estate market—is building a global laboratory for policies meant to restrain the arrival of Chinese money. The province is hiking taxes, toughening transparency rules, and tightening oversight of casinos and financial institutions."

"The money is arriving so fast, and in such volume, though, that standing by is no longer an option. Vancouver was perhaps the first major Western city to experience the full force of Chinese capital. Soon, it could be the first to learn what happens when you try to stop it."

"Thanks substantially to purchases by wealthy foreigners, the city’s property values are now the highest in the country. The median cost of a detached home in Vancouver proper has tripled since 2005, to C$1.5 million, making millionaires of thousands of homeowners."

"During much of this buildup, 'no one was complaining,' says Chip Wilson, the controversial founder of clothing retailer Lululemon Athletica Inc., one the few international brands to come out of the city. 'If you’re 60 years old and you want to retire, well, you’ve got a two-and-a-half-million-dollar house. You sell it, you move to one of the most beautiful islands in the world off the coast here for $500,000. You’ve got $2 million in the bank, and Bob’s your uncle.'"