It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "I was not surprised to hear housing prices have fallen for the first time in something like a decade. I could have hazarded a guess that was the case based on nothing more than the aggressive selling and house flipping I have watched in my neighborhood in the recent past. A couple of years ago, houses would go up for sale and they would sell the very same day. Then, all of a sudden, houses started taking a few more days to sell; then a week; then a little longer, and a little longer; then, next thing you know, the news announces a dip in housing prices for the first time since seemingly ever. Nothing lasts forever, after all."

"The challenge is that a lot of homes on the market, especially in Flower Mound and Highland Village, are priced out of buyers’ reach. Audra Smolinski, a broker and Realtor with Loves Residential Realty, agreed that affordability is a primary factor for today’s buyers. 'They want it all, and they can’t afford it,' she said. 'It’s difficult to find anything move-in ready under $200,000.'"

"Real Housewife of New York Bethenny Frankel is giving her apartment a little summer price cut. The Skinnygirl entrepreneur has been trying to sell her Soho loft since 2017, and she’s lowered her expectations to just about breaking even. Frankel is now listing the Mercer Street abode for $4.25 million, and while it’s not pocket change by any means, it’s just $500,000 more than the $4.2 million she paid for the place back in 2014, and that’s not including the renovations costs and the transaction and brokerage fees."

"22 homes sold in all of Boca Isles in the first half of 2019. Every home in Boca Isles took more than a month from listing to close. Most did sell in less than 3 months, but four of them took six months or longer. It should also be noted that 13 listings expired or canceled in the first half of the year. There are 18 homes listed for sale at this writing. It remains a buyers market in Saturnia, where 8 homes sold in the first half of the year while 11 listings expired or canceled. There are 20 homes listed for sale."

"Greater Vancouver housing sales fell in June to a 19-year low for the month while the benchmark price for a typical home dropped below $1-million for the first time in two years. The price of detached homes sold in Greater Vancouver averaged $1,486,620 last month, a 15.3-per-cent drop compared with June, 2018. On Vancouver’s expensive west side, the price of detached properties sold in the first six months of this year averaged $3,119,811, down 17.5 per cent from the first half of 2018, according to Macdonald Realty."

"Board president Ashley Smith said in a statement that the 'expectation gap' between buyers and sellers lingers, with sellers 'often trying to get yesterday’s values for their homes while buyers are taking a cautious, wait-and-see approach.'"

"The construction of homes in London has fallen to its lowest level in a decade amid a slowdown across the country. Lawrence Bowles, at Savills, said: 'For London, in part the key driver is the weakness in pricing in recent months. Annual price growth has been negative for the last ten months.'"

"The Co Wicklow home of high profile solicitor Gerald Kean is back on the market more than two years after it was first launched for sale seeking €3.75million. This time around it comes with a substantial price drop and a new selling agent. Drayton Mano is back on, and this time it is seeking €2.25million. The sizeable 40 per cent drop in price reflects the heady original asking price but also the sluggish market for country properties in this price bracket."

"Pity the poor owners of homes in Israel worth 20 million shekels ($5.6 million). Those grandiose properties, once in demand mainly by foreign investors, no longer have a market. It’s not just property owners. The industry that once served the top end of the Israeli real estate market – builders, architects, relators and interior designers – has seen business evaporate."

"'Neighborhoods and communities that were built for foreign residents have turned into ghost towns in the best case. In the worst case, properties have been converted into Airbnb offerings,' said Lior Shklarsh, who heads the real estate agency de-Botton in Savyon, an affluent municipality outside of Tel Aviv known for its villas."

"Siva Shanker, former president of Malaysian Institute of Estate Agents, believes that there is a bad side to the Airbnb trend. 'When the property market started to make a turn for the worse, many of these speculators found it difficult to sell or rent out their units but at the same time they needed income to service their loans. Many of the people, who claimed to be experts, gave false assurances that the properties could be sold at a premium of up to 40 percent within a couple of years, or that they would be able to get high rental yields. This is essentially a get rich quick scheme and many people believed in them. But then the market crashed and many of the buyers are saddled with a property that they can’t sell or rent out,' he said."

"Suburbanite director Anna Porter told The New Daily that a lack of mortgagee-in-possession sales suggested the market hadn’t yet reached its bottom. 'What I have seen in cycles gone by is a number of mortgagee-in-possession sales hit the market prior to reaching the bottom – and we just haven’t seen that in any real volume yet,' she said. 'A lot of people are struggling to settle on off-the-plan properties is another indicator that there is more financial distress sitting in the mortgage sector.'"

"CoreLogic senior research analyst Cameron Kusher said price falls still had a way to go in cities outside Sydney and Melbourne – as their downturns started later – and lower demand for housing in these cities meant longer recovery times. 'The big test will be when we get to spring, when more new listings come on to the market,' he said."

"The developer of a micro flat project in Hong Kong has cut the price of flats that are smaller than a car parking space by 38 per cent. Market observers said the company had to resort to steep discounts after agents managed to sell only two of the 27 units on offer at the T-Plus on December 8 last year, prompting the developer to later suspend sales."

"In China’s hi-tech hub of Shenzhen, a confluence of factors, from over-exuberant commercial property developers, to the US-China trade and tech war, to an exodus of foreign investors, are weighing heavily on what was until recently a booming economy. Developers - who have continued to build despite the macroeconomic problems - are facing huge overcapacity. The vacancy rate is now near 10-year high. The vacancy situation is most pronounced in the city’s Qianhai area near the border with Hong Kong, which has a vacancy rate of 65.7 per cent."

"The downturn is not just being felt in the property sector. A yacht broker in Shenzhen said his team of five sales people once sold 26 imported yachts in a single year, some costing millions of US dollars, to wealthy Chinese buyers earlier in the decade. Last year, they sold fewer than 10. 'The upper-middle class only buy yachts when the economy is seeing stable growth and people are making a good living – not like now. Many rich Chinese people in Shenzhen, either in the tech or finance sectors, are worried that the economic crisis is worsening, as the trade war has sharply escalated in recent months. I think our sales will be even worse than last year,' he said."

"The trend continued until 2015, said Lan Liu, operations manager of a serviced office firm in the Futian district. After that, the influx slowed, she said, and the number of Chinese firms entering the market increased. 'But to be honest, they were not as stable as the foreign clients,' said Liu, adding that many of the clients now were new Chinese financing companies, who took short-term leases and then disappear."