A holiday topic starting with KJZZ in Arizona. "Phoenix is now the top city in the country for increases in annual home prices, replacing Las Vegas. That’s according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Inde. Co-creator Robert J. Shiller talked about the slow rate of home price appreciation.SHILLER: Well, we have been in boom years in the housing market, increasingly since 2012. The big part of it is speculative. It’s people hearing about prices going up and bidding prices up so that they’re kind of too high and then the enthusiasm starts to wane and then they come down. It’s not necessarily a disaster but they come down somewhat."

"SHILLER: I’ll bring up Seattle. Seattle was the hottest city of our 20 cities and a couple of years ago it was going up in double digits much more than Phoenix is recently. But now it’s dropping. You know, we’ve seen the same thing in other cities. It tends to be glamour areas that are a little more vulnerable to bubble thinking. You can get carried away and think that the world has just discovered that Phoenix is a wonderful city. Well, it is a wonderful city. What I am saying is that wonderful city’s prices can go down, too. Or, they can get too high."

"SHILLER: One thing that I would add that I haven’t said is that housing over the long run has not made as good of an investment as the stock market. I did data from 1890 to 1990. And the housing market over the whole United States was increasing something like less than 1% in real inflation corrected terms and the stock market did spectacularly better than that. So, why is that? Well, housing is something like automobiles. It wears out. Often they get torn down eventually. They’re out of style. They have defects. They don’t last forever. So, why would one think that housing is such a good investment compared to companies that are trying to advance their investors’ interests?"

From The Province on Canada. "I am happy to be an Edmontonian. This is home. But Edmonton real estate has not been kind to homeowners. The average home in Edmonton is worth 6.8 per cent less today than was the case in 2014, five years ago. Going back 10 years, according to the city’s annual market assessment, my Edmonton residence is worth 15 per cent more today than in 2010. That’s a whopping 1.5 per cent average annual gain! (Property and education taxes are up 35%, but that’s a story for another day.)"

"There’s always another dog to kick. Over the last five years, all prairie housing has lost value. Calgary’s housing market has taken a worse pounding than Edmonton. A house in Cowtown is worth eight per cent less today than five years ago."

From Moneywise on the UK. "Existing homeowners who find they fall foul of new, stricter lending criteria may not be able to remortgage to get a cheaper deal, leaving them with higher mortgage payments at a time when they can perhaps least afford them. There are 150,000 ‘mortgage prisoners’ in this situation in the UK – still living in their homes but unable to fulfil the affordability criteria to get a better mortgage deal."

"Rae Radford, 56, is a social media consultant living in Kent. She says: 'I’m not a traditional mortgage prisoner. I supported my ex financially while he studied, so I only paid a small percentage of the mortgage. But I split with him in 2017. I am concerned that because of my age and the amount outstanding on the loan, it is more difficult to remortgage. So we are stuck on a high-interest deal until we can sell the property. It’s a lovely home, but I think it’s a buyers’ market at the moment. We can’t sell our house and we are stuck with a mortgage charging 5.9%.'"

From ABC News in Australia. "The saying 'as safe as houses' is a lie, according to Townsville resident Heather White, who is about to lose almost $100,000 on the resale of her home in the north Queensland city. When Ms White bought her family home more than a decade ago, she thought the resale profit would fund her retirement. Now she is preparing to lose almost $100,000."

"The five-bedroom house in Townsville was snapped up at the peak of the property boom in 2007 for $355,000. Twelve years later, instead of increasing in value, the home's worth has dropped so dramatically, it has left Ms White struggling to comprehend the financial loss."

"'The latest we've heard is someone might offer $260,000 and that's devastating, absolutely devastating,' Ms White said. 'You can't get your head around it — it's insulting and it's heartbreaking.'"

"The property market in the north Queensland city crashed in 2008 and still has not recovered. House values have plummeted 27.6 per cent since the peak of the property boom and units have been hit even harder, battered by a loss of 41.6 per cent. In a desperate attempt to attract buyers, Ms White shelled out a further $35,000 for renovations, which she will never recoup."

"'We completely repainted, we put new carpet down, we put new lighting through, we put security lights on, we put up security fencing,' she said. 'All your hard work and all the effort you've put in over all those years, it feels like a kick in the teeth.'"

"Real estate agent Graham Lynham said the market 'fell off a cliff' at the end of the region's mining boom. 'It's been a very slow erosion, and it's continued to erode, and frankly we don't know if we've hit bottom yet,' he said."

"A snapshot of property sales in Townsville over the last two months paints a disturbing picture of the significant price drops. It includes a luxury waterfront unit that sold for nearly $240,000 less than what it had previously been bought for. Further into the suburbs, a three-bedroom suburban home lost $159,000 at sale."

"The financial hit forced Ms White back into employment when she was planning to retire. 'Without that money, I have to go back to work — I'm not a young woman — I'm 65 in March,' Ms White said. 'I don't know when I'm going to be able to retire, because we were counting on that. And when you're talking about a $100,000 loss, where do you go, what do you do? I get angry when I think about it now, because it shouldn't be like this.'"

"The state's peak property lobby group, the Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ), has been urging the Queensland Government to boost the market by extending the first-home owners' grant to second-hand homes. REIQ Townsville representative Wayne Nicholson has worked in the city's housing market for 49 years and stressed buyers needed stimulation to help the city recover."

"'I've never seen anything as bad as what we've had — the market has been diabolical, without sugar-coating anything,' Mr Nicholson said. 'If you get a $7,000 grant from the Government, you could potentially own a house in Townsville for less than you're paying rent.'"