An editorial from Jonathan Miller in Forbes. "When the Covid-19 crisis began half way through March, the Manhattan housing market was placed on 'pause,' as were many housing markets around the country. That was the beginning of the problem this crisis posed for the industry that lives and dies on sales and rental transactions. Then a startup agent trade group (NYRAC), made up of some of the most productive agents in the market and includes many of my long-time industry friends, pushed to hide the days on market metric from the public for what turned out to be a self-serving reason. I love what they stand for, but this was a strategic error that I could not support."

"When the government ordered lockdown hit New York City, and real estate agents were not allowed to provide in-person showings, market activity immediately stalled. NYRAC pressured various platforms to hide days on market (DOM) information from listings. They still wanted users to be able to drill down and uncover the details, but at first glance, the DOM information was to be hidden."

"Streeteasy (owned by Zillow), the de-facto Manhattan multiple listing system in the eyes of the consumer, and the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), the leading real estate trade group with their own platform known as RLS, initially balked at the manipulation but eventually caved to NYRAC pressure."

"NYRAC made a strategic error that further damaged the long-term credibility of the real estate brokerage industry with the consumer. Not all brokers agreed with this strategy either, but this group placed enough pressure on these platforms to make the change happen."

"NYRAC and several real estate agents said to the effect, 'the buyer or seller can still look at the listing history to know how long a listing has been on the market. That data was never removed.' I always respond with 'Then why hide it in the first place?' To brokers in favor of this temporary rule who wonder why I appear to be obsessing about a nuance I say, it is never appropriate to manipulate data, made even worse by the primary motivation behind this action."

"This 'solution' ignores the buyer’s position in a sales transaction and yet last time I checked, buyers are on the other side of every sale. Any effort to partially or fully hide DOM results or any other market metric conveys the wrong message and smacks of the old 'information gatekeeper' mentality, no matter the state of the market."

From ABC News in Australia. "An economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) considered asking private firms to stop telling Australians about slumping property prices, when the early period of coronavirus panic stoked fears of a housing market crash. In a release of highly classified documents from inside Australia's central bank, economists discussed the need to treat the housing market as dysfunctional — and potentially shut down data sources letting investors know."

"Lindsay David, the founder of LF Economics, said it was shocking the central bank would contemplate asking private sector data collectors to stop informing the public. 'I personally think it's absolutely disgraceful conduct by the RBA that they have appeared to resort to giving what appears to be a manipulation of the information members of the public do and do not have access to in relation to house prices and debt.'"

The Globe and Mail in Canada. "Vancouver has always had a pretty disreputable past when it comes to the real estate game of flipping properties for fast profit. According to Jesse Donaldson, author of Land of Destiny: A History of Vancouver Real Estate, the Jungle Book author returned to the rapidly growing city to find that he’d been scammed out of his investment."

"'The rules of the game haven’t changed, and the way it operates haven’t changed much at all,' he says. 'The only question now is who is doing it and where they are from.'"

"He wanted to help his generation understand how the gap between incomes and real estate prices got so absurdly wide. He discovered that the city’s cozy relationship with property development goes back to its founding, more than 130 years ago. Foreign buying and the local wealth and tax revenues made from frenzied development is nothing new. Foreign buyers from Britain and the United States flooded into the province from 1908 to 1913. In the building boom of 1912, there was one realtor for every 100 citizens, according to his book. Half of Vancouver’s city council were in the real estate business, including the mayor, an American-born realtor named Charles Stanford Douglas."

"That same year the city had revenue of $19-million from the issuance of building permits. He tells how politicians and Canadian Pacific Railway employees with inside knowledge made vast sums of money as they speculated on properties ripe for development. 'We’ve had an interesting approach in this country; allowing people to do stuff because they have a lot of money and [government] wants investment – but they don’t want to regulate those interactions in any way. And so, you get the mess we’re in now,' Mr. Donaldson said."

"The beginnings of the current mess, he says, can be traced back to the 1980s when government began courting Asian wealth in earnest. One of Mr. Donaldson’s sources is University of British Columbia geography professor David Ley, who wrote about the government’s intentional courting of Asian investment in his book, Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines."

"The Pacific strategy culminated with Expo 86, as 'place marketing' for the Vancouver region, Mr. Donaldson said. 'It was a ton of taxpayer money that put on a big showing for rich people to invest, and they did. They were given supergood sweetheart deals that nobody else could compete with,' he said. 'It worked very well, so a lot of the same people came together and did the whole thing again for the 2010 Olympics. They were basically two big marketing campaigns for the real estate industry.'"

"UBC School of Architecture and Landscape professor Patrick Condon also published a book in the past year, called Five Rules for Tomorrow’s Cities. 'Vancouver now presents an attractive but largely false image to the world, an image that suggests comfortable citizens housed in gleaming glass towers enjoying brilliant mountain views,' he writes. 'Unfortunately, this image conceals the reality where many of those high-rise units sit empty – nothing but ‘cash boxes in the sky’ for investors – while wage earners crowd into small apartments, often devoting well over 50 per cent of their after-tax income to rent.'"

"Mr. Donaldson also looks to senior government to get back to protecting its citizens with robust housing programs. As to why government didn’t intervene sooner, before we entered crisis mode, he can’t help but be cynical. 'There have been plenty of people who’ve raised the alarm about it over the years. … And it seemed silly that nobody really noticed for as long as they did, because it had been happening for so long, the exact same pattern writ large. The most charitable interpretation that I have is that they didn’t ask any questions because they didn’t want the faucet of money to get turned off.'"