It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "As the housing market has downshifted, more builders are offering sweeteners to close the deal. 'We are really working a little bit harder ... to get people in the door and to get people excited,' said Mark Mullin, a real estate agent selling several new projects in the Los Angeles area. 'These are things they were not having to do a year ago.'"

"John Mulville, the Southern California regional director for Metrostudy, said there’s more fear among companies that focus on pricier homes. Even in good times, there are few people who can afford a house above $1.5 million. Some have even used the 'p-word' — panic — Mulville said."

"Builders may have gotten too aggressive on pricing. On a recent single-family project in downtown Huntington Beach, luxury builder WJK Development tried unsuccessfully to push prices up to $2.2 million, 10% above the previous per-square-foot record for the area. 'We took prices beyond the realm of realty,' said Grant Keene, chief executive of the Irvine company. 'It made consumers balk.'"

"After six years of tilting toward sellers, the metro Atlanta housing market may be starting to even out. The trend of ever-greater competition for a shrinking number of properties seems to have peaked. 'The kind of market we had before just couldn’t last forever and 2018 was the year it started to normalize a little,' said John Rainey, Re/Max vice president for Georgia."

"No, it's not your imagination — some of those home 'For Sale' signs in your neighborhood are getting a bit long in the tooth. The average time it takes to sell a house in North Texas has gone up about 20 percent in the last couple of years. In some neighborhoods, the time those 'For Sale' signs are parked out front has grown even larger."

"Chris Kelly, CEO of North Texas' Ebby Halliday Realtors, says his firm's agents are telling sellers not to be impatient. 'At the time of the listing, we are showing them the stats from their articular market and telling them what to expect,' Kelly said. 'Unfortunately, what consumers expect is often delayed from reality.'"

"'I think a lot of the buyers have gone to the sidelines,' Douglas Elliman NYC CEO Steven James said. 'If you look at all the areas, whether it's Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Riverdale, Westchester, everywhere, it's all the same story. It's about the reset. It's about the changing the mindset of the seller. The buyer has already changed their mindset has already changed. They're not buying into the story...The last to receive the message is the seller.'"

"The message, he says, is, lower your price to sell."

"The stalemate in Washington is throwing a wrench into some people’s plans to buy a house, according to real estate experts. The housing market in Escambia County, Florida, was already slowing down over the last few months, said John Rickmon, a broker there. 'This is the dagger,' he said."

"Spare a thought today for poor Chip Wilson. The Lululemon founder’s waterfront mansion lost nearly $6-million in value last year. It’s now worth just a little over $73-million, according to the latest B.C. property assessment figures."

"But it’s not just the mega-rich witnessing a drop in the estimated worth of their homes. It’s a phenomenon occurring in the detached home market throughout Greater Vancouver. It’s happening in Toronto, too, where sales in 2018 fell off a cliff."

"It’s not even just Canada. Some of the most expensive markets in the world, including Hong Kong and London, have seen recent declines. Singapore is in the grips of a slowdown as well; Australia, too. The great global housing slump is on, and how deep and devastating it becomes remains to be seen. The fact is, cheap money has been too easy to get the past several years. And Canadians have stuffed themselves on it."

"Australian house prices have finally ceased their extraordinary run and started falling back down to earth. Housing price corrections that occurred in Ireland, the US and Europe resulted in falls, and although analysts like to think the Australian market is exceptional, and sometimes immune to these kinds of price shifts, that, according to financial analyst Martin North, is a fiction."

"'It's not just the battling urban fringe ... I'm more concerned about price corrections at the top of the market, where in some cases prices have already corrected more than 20 per cent from their previous peaks,' North said. 'We should get used to the fact that prices can go down, as well as up.'"

"For the past five years dramatic property price increases in Melbourne and Sydney have pushed up prices across the country, to almost alarming degrees in some areas. Sydney prices jumped 56 per cent in that time. Property reports at the end of 2017 were gushing that the national property overall growth rate was at the 'fastest pace since 2009,' A year later the same reports were gasping about the 'weakest housing market conditions since 2008.'"

"There’s a lot of talk about property at the moment for different reasons, but looming elections would be fuelling some of it. Politicians worry when the property market gets the wobbles, and tend to shrug off the negatives that come with a boom."

"Australia needed a correction in its upward property spiral, which largely shut out first home buyers and was fuelled by tax policies that still privilege existing owners, coupled with years of very low interest rates."

"It could be argued that regulators took much too long to force financial institutions to put the brakes on investor lending. The banking royal commission has shown some lenders had little regard for borrowers’ capacity to pay or the likelihood that a market correction could leave people with loans greater than their properties are worth."

"The reality for millions of Australians is that owning their own home remains completely out of reach. That should not be forgotten as we come back to earth after a period of property prices on steroids."