A report from the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. "An Erskineville apartment development remains a ghost town more than 12 months after it was completed, with the City of Sydney refusing to allow owners to move in over fears the developer did not properly clean up toxic land underneath it."

"The Herald's revelation that owners have been prevented from living in a fourth Sydney apartment building over safety concerns comes less than 24 hours after an emergency meeting between the state and federal governments over the country’s building standards crisis. The Sugarcube apartment building development in Erskineville has been delayed."

"The Zetland, Mascot and Opal Tower apartments across Sydney have all been evacuated in the last 12 months due to major defects. The 109 'Sugarcube' apartments, and 18 'Honeycomb' terraces were built at the old Ashmore industrial estate in Erskineville, with construction finished in April 2018 according to promotional material."

"Furious buyers who paid upwards of $1 million for a slice of 'the sweet life' have been left demanding answers over why they have been left in limbo. Some purchased off-the-plan as far back as early 2015. 'All of our possessions are in storage or in bags and boxes,' one man wrote. 'We have had to extend our home loan SIX TIMES while we wait … it’s a joke. We can’t go on like this any longer.'"

The Australian Financial Review. "More than 200,000 properties in Melbourne and Sydney have slipped below the $1 million market since the end of the property boom triggered a record reversal in prices, exclusive analysis shows."

"Top properties in popular postcodes were among the hardest hit. Median price falls in Sydney and Melbourne clipped between 11 and 14 per cent off property values, or about $136,000 in Sydney, according to analysis by Corelogic for The Australian Financial Review based on a survey of about 8.7 million households around the nation."

"'That’s because they were among the most overvalued,' says Cameron Kusher, Corelogic’s senior research analyst."

"But it was the former mining boom towns of Perth and Darwin that were hit the hardest, with respective falls of 30 and 20 per cent compared to a national decline of just over 8 per cent. Darwin’s percentage of $1 million properties has fallen from 5 per cent to 2 per cent in the past five years and there are no signs of a turnaround, according to market analysts."

"The biggest percentage of falling million-dollar properties was 23 per cent in Melbourne, followed by 19 per cent in Sydney, despite there being more gilt-edged real estate in premium postcodes around the harbour. It is the biggest downturn since Corelogic began collating data in 1980. Across the nation more than 230,000 residential properties have fallen below the benchmark."

"Despite this, Sydney and Melbourne’s median property prices are still among the highest in the world and about 60 per cent less affordable than booming Seattle and New York, global investment bank Morgan Stanley."

The Times of London on Spain. "In 2006 I bought a home on the Catalan coast. To finance the purchase I arranged a mortgage with Banco Sabadell. I tried a British bank, but they proved painfully slow. My Spanish bank manager, Josep, found British bureaucracy hard to understand. 'It’s not a difficult decision,' he remarked. 'You look at the house. Is it good? Sí. You look at the borrower. Can he make the payments? Sí. That shouldn’t take more than two days.'"

"At the time, Josep’s attitude seemed refreshing. The Spanish, I thought, could teach the British a lot about user-friendly banking. Thirteen years later, I’m not so sure. I was unwittingly part of the Spanish property boom, when the number of British homeowners in Spain topped one million. This was a time of dinero fácil — easy money — when mortgages were handed out like sweets. But then came the crash."

"Property booms drive even the most sensible people gaga. Most Spaniards would have realised that the good times could not last, but they were addicted to the excitement of dinero fácil. Perhaps more than any other city, Valencia embodied the febrile exhilaration of the boom. 'The city that borrowed more rashly, built more lavishly and invested more foolishly, than any other,' says Tobias Buck, author of After the Fall."

"Across the country, municipal and private authorities built extravagant museums, futuristic stadiums, lavish motor-racing tracks, oversized hospitals, unnecessary airports and, of course, ugly tower blocks. Yet only Valencia built them all. In truth, quite a few were never finished. They are skeletal monuments to economic folly."

"When the crash came in 2008, a slump in the housing market quickly became a banking crisis and then a political calamity. But it was, most of all, a psychological crisis. A prosperous country suddenly became poor. Spaniards were rudely awoken from a very pleasant dream: 'We thought we were rich, but we weren’t... We trusted our leaders, but they failed us. We trusted our banks, but they betrayed us.' Everyday certainties dissolved into dust."