It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "'Rising interest rates can affect what a borrower can qualify for and the maximum purchase price or loan amount. It would mean higher monthly mortgage payments,' explained Alan Barbic, president of the Silicon Valley Association of Realtor. 'Higher interest rates can also result in home sellers dropping their asking price in order to attract buyers, which helps stabilize home prices. This could be the direction our housing market is heading.'"

"Palm Beach County home sales plummeted in January to their lowest level since the Great Recession. 'The spike in interest rates just cooled the number of buyers off,' said Henry Kaplan, sales manager at Century 21 Tenace Realty in Boynton Beach. Now, Realtors say, buyers have more bargaining power — and sellers are being forced to cut prices."

"Terry Story, an agent in Boca Raton, said she recently persuaded a dozen of her clients to reduce their asking prices. 'They were overpriced,' Story said. 'A lot of sellers base their prices on what their neighbors were asking.' Story sees a bright side to softer sale prices. 'Our prices have been unsustainable increases, and it needed to roll back a little bit,' she said."

"Cedar Park saw a drop of 38.5 percent in residential sales. 'In December 2018, new listings on the market returned to more normal levels compared to December 2017,' ABoR President Kevin P. Scanlan said. 'This resulted in a slight decrease in January sales this year. Scanlan said that 'future homeowners are still buying' so the Austin real estate market remains competitive."

"My, how times have changed. New restrictions on foreign buyers combined with a perception that the United States is no longer a friendly market have caused a major shift in real estate buying in New York and across the country. Sellers have been cutting their asking prices at the top end of the market for a while, and now the trend is spreading."

"'We saw [price cuts] coming 18 to 24 months ago, but the impact is now beginning to trickle down to into Manhattan’s lower-end market,' says James Morgan, an agent at Compass. 'In Manhattan, what’s happening isn’t just impacting the luxury market.'"

"Almost 200 buyers of presale condominiums in a Scarborough project still don’t know what will become of their money or the homes they agreed to purchase from Forme Development Group Inc., which filed for creditor protection late last year. Yingguo Ai, of Brantford, Ont. is one of the dozens of unsecured creditors and he worries he and his fellow lenders will not be fully repaid in the process. 'I put my RRSP and [my] wife’s together, $300,000, my wife and me together. That’s my retirement income, if lost I couldn’t get back that money for [the] rest of my life,' he said."

"Geeta Nanda, chief executive of Metropolitan Thames Valley, told Inside Housing: 'In London, if you look at resales, shared ownership, staircasing, new build shared ownership, we’re seeing generally a slowdown. Market sale is that much worse. It’s an incredibly quiet market at the moment and again, people are not committing. We’re seeing a massive slowdown in terms of market sale.' One finance director, who preferred not to be named, added: 'The tide’s receding and people are being left visible.'"

"Liss Ard took the plunge this week when its asking price dropped online from €7.5 million to €5 million. The dramatic drop is an indicator of the challenge the country homes market faces at the moment given that the historic spread did not budge its price even once in the intervening period. Now it has clearly been priced to sell."

"A property in East Melbourne is selling for more than 40 per cent less that what it was listed in the middle of last year. Martin North, principal of Digital Finance Analytics, said discounts of more than 40 per cent were also being made in Victoria's Red Hill, and Sydney suburbs including Box Hill and Agnes Banks."

"'Typically, in a downturn it's the top end of the market which dies first, and the decay in price spreads down the market like a canker,' said Mr North. He estimated one-in-ten households were in negative equity, where the value of the mortgage is bigger than the expected realisable value of the property."

"Sydney home owners are slashing prices at a rate not seen in a decade. Domain senior research analyst Nicola Powell said vendors were struggling to adjust price expectations quickly enough. 'We’ve got people knocking back the first offer they get and then selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars less three or six months later,' said Tim Fraser of Di Jones Real Estate North Shore."

"Despite prices being in decline for nearly two years, Mr Fraser said, many home owners still expected prices from the 2017 peak. Sandra and Norm Cahill have been trying to sell their four-bedroom Epping house since October and thought they would have no problem selling within their previous agent’s suggested price range of $1.8 million to $2.1 million."

"'We said we wouldn’t drop the price below $1.8 million,' Mrs Cahill laughed. 'We didn’t have one offer for the [first] three months, even after we dropped the price [to $1.65 million] … We’re now sitting at $1.53 million, that’s a big drop."

"It looks like there are still a lot of unsold houses in Malaysia! It was reported that residential property prices are expected to decline over the next few years due to the dumping of unsold homes, which are currently valued at RM29.97 billion. Now, that is a lot!"

"Rahim & Co International’s Director of Strategic Research and Planning, Sulaiman Saheh has stated that the trend is expected to continue until 2021, unless there is an increase in house purchasing rates. 'I have mentioned this a few years ago – Malaysians, maybe we need to make more babies. Our population is insufficient to keep up with the supply of residential units in the market,' he said."