It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "The Commerce Department said on Friday new home sales dropped 12.8% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 635,000 units last month. It was the biggest monthly decline since July 2013. The median new house price was $312,800, down 4.5% from a year earlier. There were 337,000 new homes on the market last month, up 1.2% from June. At July’s sales pace it would take 6.4 months to clear the supply of houses on the market."

"Foreign investors purchased $77.9 billion in residential property in the 12 months ending in March, down 36% from the previous 12-month period, the National Association of Realtors said. Meanwhile, more Chinese homeowners have been selling their American houses and condos because they can’t pay the maintenance costs with their money trapped in China, says Jeff Lu, vice president of Fidelity National Title Insurance Company. In Irvine, population 280,000, 'There are 65,000 houses... and 21,000 of them are owned by Chinese.' Lu says."

"The pullback is depressing prices. In the first half of the year, the median home sale price in Irvine fell to $820,000 from $834,000, according to Zillow. 'It’s good news for local Americans who are looking to buy a home – larger supply and less competitors,' Lu added."

"Barack and Michelle Obama may be buying a place on Martha’s Vineyard. The manse has been on the market since August 2015, when it was listed for a whopping $22.5 million, before plummeting to $16,250,000, according to a realtor.com article from last year. Now, it’s on the market for $14,850,000, but, says TMZ, 'the Obamas are apparently paying less.'"

"With so many NYC homes not finding buyers, there is a continued glut of for-sale inventory. On top of the existing surplus, new inventory increased in all three boroughs analyzed, led by Queens, where 877 new homes came onto the market. Total for-sale inventory in the borough reached a new high of 3,610 homes, up 22.5% from last year."

"'It's typical for the number of price cuts to dip during the summer, when many sellers skip town and shift their focus away from selling their homes,' says StreetEasy EconomistNancy Wu. 'But for motivated sellers, now is actually the time to offer discounts and help prospective buyers otice your property. With the return of home-shopping season this fall, and a wave of new homes coming to market, sellers will soon have even more competition, making additional price cuts — possibly at record levels — virtually inevitable.'"

"A Miami-Dade judge ruled the developers of Regalia, a luxury condo tower in Sunny Isles Beach, must turn over 100 percent interest in the companies that own the remaining two – and most expensive – unsold units, The Real Deal has learned. Josh Migdal, a partner at the Miami law firm Mark, Migdal & Hayden, who is not involved in litigation involving Regalia, said the order to give up ownership interest in the company that owns the remaining units gives 'an interesting signal about the demand and value of the units.'"

"'If there was demand for the units at value sufficient to satisfy the judgment and leave some profit, then the developer would have chosen that path,' he said."

"Since April, 2017, the price of a detached house in the GTA has fallen approximately 15 per cent from its peak, Cameron Forbes, general manager of ReMax Realtron Realty Inc., says. Real estate agent Matthew Regan believes that sellers are beginning to see the importance of setting the right asking price for a property. 'It has taken a while for some sellers to sober up from the price acceleration of 2017,' he says of the first quarter of that year, when prices were running 30 per cent ahead of the same period a year earlier."

"These days, homeowners who insist on setting a 2017-level asking price won’t sell quickly, he says. 'If the house is overpriced, it’s going to sit.'"

"Sakina Hassanali, head of development consulting at real estate firm Hass Consult, is not a big fan of the phrase ‘property bubble burst’ in relation to the Kenyan situation. And she is not alone, many real estate stakeholders have previously been at pains to dissociate what has been variously referred to as a slump or market slowdown in local market from the more ominous term, bubble burst."

"'In Kenya, we’re not at any risk of a bubble, what we’re at risk of is just a slow down. And this and we can see it in the figures. In the last quarter the property prices went down three per cent,' she said."

"Some mainland Chinese investors who bought properties in Hong Kong at high prices several years ago have panicked amid souring sentiment and sold at big losses of up to HK$8.2 million. At least four properties have been sold in such panicked behaviour since July. 'Mainlanders are interesting. When they want to sell flats, they would not think so much and want to sell it immediately,' said Hendrick Leung, director at Centaline Finance."

"National Australia Bank faces a lawsuit from the corporate watchdog over a scandal involving its use of home loan 'introducers,' in a landmark case that could attract a maximum penalty of more than $500 million. Daniel Crennan , who is ASIC's top enforcer after the regulator has been criticised for being too timid, described aspects of the bank's system in relation to introducers as 'broken,' pointing to documents that included false signatures and false payslips."

"'There will be other cases in coming weeks and months, certainly before the Christmas, there will be a significant number of cases that relate to the royal commission being issued,' he said."

"It’s not a typo. A discount of up to $10 million is on offer for deep-pocketed buyers looking at this super-luxury East Melbourne apartment. The oversized residence on level 11 of the sought-after 150 Clarendon development was listed for sale in May with eye-watering price hopes of $46 million. But the home’s price guide has now been dropped to $36 million to $39.6 million."

"Listing agent Marty Fox declined to comment when contacted by Domain. When the property first hit the market, Domain asked if he thought the home would sell for its $46 million price tag, to which he responded at the time: 'The price is $46 million.'"

"We are a decade into a global economic experiment that is certain to fail. This will come as a surprise to the likes of Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr, who recently told Jack Tame: 'economic growth will be picking up.' He's wrong. When the wheels fell off the economic machine back in 2008 central banks tried to solve the world's economic malaise by cutting interest rates."

"Orr, and his fellow central bankers, have created an economic bubble with a decade of cheap money. They are desperately trying to keep it afloat with ever larger amounts of more cheap money. It is possible that they can keep this going for a while longer, but they cannot keep it going forever."