A report from the Toronto Star in Canada. "Over the last few months, the staggering scale of money laundering in the Toronto and Vancouver real estate markets has come into focus. Even though real-estate agents are technically required to report suspicious transactions, they are incentivized by commissions to look the other way. The Star reported last year that Canadian real-estate agents submitted suspicious transaction reports inless than 0.008 per cent of property sales made between 2013 and 2017."

"Garry Clement, former national director of the RCMP's proceeds of crime program, now trains bankers and other professionals — including real-estate agents — on how to catch money laundering. He said he was shocked when he asked a room full of real-estate agents how many of them had ever accepted cash payments. 'The hands shot up,' he said. 'They just didn't see anything wrong with it.'"

"Even when they suspect something is fishy, real-estate agents don't want to turn down big commissions. 'They haven't taken (the money laundering rules) seriously,' he said. 'This plays into the hands of organized crime. They'll never get it right until some prominent agent or broker is walked out in handcuffs.'"

From ABC News on China. "Build it and they will come. That is the philosophy underpinning modern China's urban fields of dreams. In some senses they have, and do, come. But they are not residents or businesses in many of China's gleaming new towers. They are investors — speculators betting that property values only go up."

"It's been a good bet for a long time, but analysts warn, like all good things, one day it must come to an end. The reason for the long-term concern? The number of empty properties in a country already renowned for its ghost cities is still rising."

"With an estimated 21.4 per cent dwellings vacant at the end of 2017, China now has as much as 6.4 billion square metres of empty residential floor space. That is 1.68 times the amount of floor space built over the past five years, and hints at the scale of construction downturn needed to allow the excess supply to be filled with residents."

"To give you a better sense of the scale of China's overbuilding, assuming a reasonably generous average of 80sqm of floorspace per new dwelling, that is 80 million units that are currently sitting empty. Even relative to China's population of 1.4 billion, 80 million is a lot of empty homes — more than any other country Citi looked at, except for the recession-ravaged economies of Spain and Italy."

"Unlike Spain and Italy, though, purchaser demand for urban residential property in China remains high for now, as illustrated by eye-watering price-to-income ratios that make expensive cities like Sydney and Vancouver look cheap. 'The high vacancy ratio suggests that future property investment is bound to decline, as the property market may have entered into a state of oversupply, and as the motivation for property purchases has increasingly become investment driven,' Citi warned."

"Citi warns that eventual moves towards property taxation may see speculators flee the Chinese property market, or it might collapse through sheer oversupply and indebtedness. If and when this happens, the same forces driving demand for Australian commodities up will reverse."

"'The property sector tends to affect a broad set of industrials and contributes to around one-third of China's industrial output, directly and indirectly,' Citi's economists cautioned. 'Meanwhile, the declining property price may trigger rising default risk on the housing debt, potentially threatening the financial stability as well.'"

"But can-kicking has become the specialty of global policy makers, and the road hasn't run out yet."

From Domain News in Australia. "House prices have dropped most in a string of affluent east coast electorates that are largely Liberal-held, new figures show. Seats held by Labor were not immune, as the housing market weakens across the nation’s two largest cities."

"Housing policy has been a hot topic in the campaign, with Labor proposing to curb negative gearing tax breaks in a policy that the Coalition warns would force prices down further, and the Coalition unveiling its own policy to help first-home buyers get into the market with a low deposit."

"Along Melbourne’s bayside, the seat of Macnamara, formerly Melbourne Ports and held by the ALP’s retiring Michael Danby, house prices fell 29.4 per cent over the past year, the highest declines of any seat."

"Some of the most sharp falls have been in Melbourne’s leafy eastern suburbs. Prices across Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s blue-chip electorate of Kooyong have fallen 19 per cent over the year to the end of March, while outgoing Jobs Minister Kelly O’Dwyer’s old seat of Higgins has seen prices drop the same amount, Domain figures show."

"Further east in Chisholm, which was held by Liberal-turned-independent Julia Banks who switched focus to contest coastal seat Flinders instead, prices dropped 19.6 per cent over the past year. In Sydney, house prices fell more than 18 per cent in each of the Liberal-held electorates of Bennelong on the north shore and Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s seat of Cook in the south."

"As the election looms, worries about falling prices demonstrated the insecurity of a nation where so much household wealth depends on home ownership, University of Sydney urban planner and policy analyst Professor Nicole Gurran said."

"'It’s kind of ironic – we had a lot of political posturing when the market was at its peak, the government saying how worried they were about housing affordability,' she said. 'There’s this panic prices might fall. If you’re an aspiring first-home buyer or renter it’d leave you a bit confused, you’d think housing affordability measures should result in some cooling.'"