From WGLT on Illinois. "For years, Illinois State University has been knocking down old dorms and nudging its sophomores, junior, and seniors into off-campus apartments. Developers and landlords looking to make a buck responded by building more and more apartment buildings. But all that could soon be flipped upside down."

"ISU is pivoting back into on-campus housing. Landlords say vacancies will rise as more students stay on campus, cutting into their revenue and increasing the likelihood for dilapidation and even foreclosures."

"Landlords say the apartment market is already saturated. 'We’re overbuilt right now. There’s lots of vacancies,' said Tom O’Rourke, owner of Redbird Property Management, which manages 310 student apartment units."

"'There’s gonna be some pain,' said Ed Sauder, an owner of The Summit, the $4 million-plus student apartment building that opened in 2018. 'If you have somebody that’s highly leveraged, and their cash flow is based on a historical 90 percent occupancy rate, and they shift to 80 percent, they’re not gonna be able to make cash flow. And the banks will be very aggressive on keeping tabs of that.'"

The Daily Hive on Washington. "Vancouver’s rental scene is clearly a seller’s market. It is a whole different ball game in Seattle, where rents have fallen year-over-year and vacancies have reached the double digits in recent months — a vacancy of 10.5% within the city of Seattle, and 8.6% across the Seattle region."

"A search on Craigslist returns hundreds of available rental properties that offer gift cards and/or free rent upon moving in. Most listings offer a minimum Amazon or Visa gift card value of USD$500, while some are high as USD$2,000. And on top of the free gift card, many listings also offer free rent ranging from two weeks to as long as two months, with most listings offering one month."

"'Typically in Seattle when a new building opens up with lots of vacancies they do offer move-in specials to try to sway renters over to the building,' Kim Reidy, a senior broker at Point 3 Real Estate, told Daily Hive."

The Post and Courier on South Carolina. "A proposed 'pop up hotel' plan at Charleston’s rising WestEdge development is over, before it ever really started. What was unusual about the application was that it was proposed for an already-rising apartment building, 10 WestEdge."

"The pop up hotel concept is the brainchild of hospitality start-up WhyHotel. By operating temporary lodgings in luxury apartment buildings, the company isn’t quite a hotel but also differs from home-share services such as Airbnb. The company also claims to help solve a business problem for many apartment buildings: bringing in revenue during the first couple years of operation, when some units sit empty."

"The arrangement had seemed like a 'win-win proposition,' said David Tyndall, owner of the firm behind the WestEdge developments. But venturing into hotel development in Charleston proved to be complicated. 'None of us are hotel developers, not do any of us have plans to become such,' Tyndall said."

From Bloomberg. "Steve Cohen is having trouble selling one of his trophy properties. The billionaire has dropped the price of his midtown Manhattan duplex more than six times in six years and is now asking US$45 million for the apartment -- a US$70 million discount to the US$115 million he originally listed it for in April 2013."

"'He finally got it right, and the market will show him that,' said luxury broker Victoria Shtainer, who lives in the building. 'One Beacon Court used to be the only game in town,' she said. 'That's why he priced it so crazily.'"