A report from Marketplace. "New survey data on Wednesday from the National Association of Homebuilders shows builder confidence fell the most ever in a month, to 30. Anything below 50 is considered negative, and this is the first negative reading in more than five years. Jeff Caruso, CEO of Caruso Homes in Maryland, says his sales are down probably 80% so far this month, partly because mortgage lenders have tightened their credit standards."

The Tampa Bay Times in Florida. "Before the pandemic began to sweep the nation, the Tampa Bay area was in the midst of an unprecedented apartment boom. Developers had completed 170 projects with a total of nearly 22,700 units in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties since the 2010 end of the Great Recession, according to the Tampa brokerage Franklin Street. Still under construction are 34 projects with a total of nearly 7,900 units. The vast majority are in Tampa and St. Petersburg, where developers touted the appeal of walking from 'luxury' apartments."

"Even before the coronavirus, said Darron Kattan, an expert on multi-family housing, bankers had started tightening up on loans for apartment projects. If the coronavirus continues to spread, developers face the prospect of thousands of apartments hitting the market at a time of stay-at-home orders and massive unemployment. Will they have a hard time filling units? Will they have to offer bigger-than-usual incentives to move in? Will they have to charge lower rents than planned?"

"'Yes, yes and yes,' Kattan said."

From AM New York. "Rent prices across four boroughs increased slightly in March, but some areas saw more dramatic increases and decreases than others, a report by MNS Real Estate showed. In Tribeca, one of the most expensive areas of Manhattan, the report found that one-bedroom apartments without a doorman dropped in price by more than 16%, beating out SoHo one-bedrooms with a doorman, which only dropped by 15%."

"Studio apartments in Queens’ Ridgewood neighborhood boasted the most dramatic drop of any neighborhood in the city, with a drop in average price of just over 22%. In the Bronx, studio apartments in Mott Haven saw the greatest decrease, with a 6.8% decline in average price."

The Los Angeles Times. "A growing number of states and cities have enacted eviction moratoriums to protect tenants from losing their homes if they can’t pay the rent during the coronavirus emergency. Most moratoriums simply halt evictions for non-payment. Tenants will eventually have to come up with the rent payments they missed. If they can’t pay off their rent debt, they’ll still face eviction and hardship. Tenant groups are pushing governors in California, New York, Washington and other states to go further and use their emergency powers to fully cancel rent obligations until communities reopen. And others are calling on tenants to withhold payments in a coordinated rent strike on May 1 to force the issue."

"Without rent coming in, these landlords risk foreclosure if their lenders don’t give them the option to delay mortgage payments. And that’s just the mortgage payment. Landlords still need to pay property taxes, insurance and maintenance, even if the rent checks stop coming. There’s a real concern that the financial toll caused by lost rental income could prompt landlords to sell their properties in droves."

The Lens on Louisiana. "Andreanicia Morris, executive director of Housing NOLA said she was caught off-guard by a different statistic included in the report: the number of vacant homes in the city. According to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, New Orleans had an average 37,702 vacant housing units at any one time from 2014 to 2018. Over half of those are categorized as 'other vacancies,' which includes blighted homes. However, the more telling number for Morris is the 7,360 vacant units that are actually on the rental market."

"'That we had 7,300 apartments that are occupiable is breathtaking. I knew we had a lot, I did not know it was that many,' she said. 'This isn’t a market that we can tweak. These aren’t systems that need a little patience. These systems need to be massively retooled, because they are broken.'"

The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio. "It’s difficult to time the real-estate market. For decades, it was understood that you could safely put your money into a home, sit back, and watch your home’s value go up. In our lifetimes, the real-estate market has now suffered at least two major shocks. The first one was the Great Recession in 2008, and the second one is just beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic."

"We usually think of rental property owners as being large companies or entities, but there are millions of rental units owned by individuals. If those individuals have no income from their tenants, those owners likely will default on their mortgage payments, or they might try to sell their units. And, when we say units, those units might be single-family homes, townhouse units or condominiums."

From Globes. "On a normal day, Centennial Bank’s Florida operations would issue five loans and get two others repaid, but nothing has been normal since the coronavirus set in and threw the once robust commercial real estate market into uncertainty. 'We are not lending any new money,' said David Druey, Centennial Florida regional president in Pompano Beach. 'We haven’t had people calling us saying, ‘Oh, I want to borrow money.’ It’s not really about expansion today."

"This leaves landlords stuck between nonpaying tenants and their own lenders. A deluge of loan defaults is expected once courts lift foreclosure moratoriums. 'We are expecting an uptick in the default space because of those companies, corporations and residents that are affected by the long-term effects of the hit on the economy,' said Jason Vanslette, partner at Kelley Kronenberg in Davie."

"One scenario projects an 8 percent default rate on commercial real estate loans, up from the current 0.4%, with the lodging industry taking the hardest hit, according to research by analytics firm Trepp LLC, part of British media company Daily Mail and General Trust. Hotel loans could experience a 35% default rate followed by retailers at 16% through the end of 2023, according to Trepp. Office loans could have a 4.3% default rate, while multifamily and industrial would fare relatively well at 3% each."

"The U.S. already is reporting a record number of unemployment benefit applications. And the medical crisis is having a more widespread economic impact than the financial crisis of 2008. 'It’s having a ripple effect across industries,' said MMG managing partner Gabriel Navarro. 'The impact — be it to retail landlords, to multifamily landlords who are going to be challenged with individuals paying rents, office landlords who are going to be challenged by office tenants having difficulty to pay rent — I think the impacts are going to be across every asset class and every asset. I don’t think anybody is immune from this one.'"

From Housing Wire. "Opendoor, which has raised more than $1 billion in funding in the last few years, laid off over 600 of its employees Wednesday as the company struggles to deal with the economic impact of the coronavirus. This comes after a wave of iBuyers have either paused iBuying, started cancelling contracts, or made sizable amounts of layoffs. 'Given the shelter-in-place guidelines, we’ve seen declines in the number of people buying, selling, and moving during this time of uncertainty. In response, we’ve announced to the company that we’ve made the difficult decision to reduce our team by 35%,' Eric Wu, chief executive officer of Opendoor, said in a statement."

"The layoffs are the latest in a series of moves by Opendoor to deal with the downturn in the housing market. The company recently paused its homebuying efforts and began canceling pending contracts, leaving some home sellers stranded with two mortgages. And now, the company has laid off 35% of its staff. It’s a swift fall for a company that was once thought of as one of the companies that could become the 'Amazon of housing,' a true one-stop-shop for all things housing."

From Chicago Agent Magazine. "Less than two weeks after making news for temporarily suspending its iBuying program in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Redfin has furloughed – and in some cases permanently let go – just over 40 percent of its agent workforce. At an Agent Publishing event in early March, @properties co-owner Thad Wong said that, although Redfin has captured a substantial portion of the market in places like Seattle, where their market share is 4% to 5%, they’re still not profitable. 'They started before Zillow, so they’ve been around for 14 to 15 years; most people would consider that a failure,' Wong said."

"A downturn in the economy is something that has worried Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman for some time, something he addressed during a December 2018 GeekWire Summit. 'This is a risky business, right? If the economy turns even slightly, you could be left holding a lot of houses on your books. Does that scare you?' GeekWire co-founder John Cook asked Kelman at the event. 'Do you remember Chevy Chase in Vacation, when he’s about to jump into the cold water, saying, ‘This is crazy?’ Kelman replied. 'I think all of us getting into this business have that voice in our head, but we also have that chart in our face, which says that fortune favors the bold.'"