A report from the Real Deal on Florida. "The co-founder of a blockchain company paid $5.2 million for a unit at Regalia in Sunny Isles Beach, well under its previous trade price. The 5.5K sf unit last sold for for about $7M in 2014."

The Gainesville Sun in Florida. "Hundreds joined in the hearing at various times, and speaker after speaker said development regulations that allow student encroachment into historic neighborhoods must stop. 'It’s disgusting that the … city has continued to put UF students who are going to be here for four years over Gainesville city residents,' said Marian Mohamed. 'There are not even enough students to fill in all of the luxury apartment complexes we have in Gainesville.'"

"Darry Lloyd, a Florida Housing board member, said the corporation has been unable to find a buyer for affordable housing and has been paying about $30,000 a year in property taxes. 'One thing we all did not want was student housing, and that’s part of the reason why the property stayed dormant for this long,' Lloyd said. 'We were certainly hoping that it was going to be a development. It didn’t happen — there was no money, nobody could find any money.'"

From Forbes. "Colleges and universities have been preparing for some form of hybrid learning re-opening in fall 2020, more or less, since the start of the pandemic in March. One campus senior leader with whom I spoke, reflecting on his recent walk across campus, said he looked up at of their new classroom buildings and residence halls and said, ‘My god, what if we built these all wrong?’ wondering about the future needs of his university."

The Jewish Voice on New York. "Momentum has swung back in favor of renters, and so landlords across New York City are giving and giving in the hopes of renting and renting. 'May also saw the largest year-over-year increase in new listings in nearly four years, with the number apartments listed for rent in Manhattan jumping 34%, to 7,420,' CNBC reported. 'There were more empty apartments on the market last month than at any time since real estate appraiser Miller Samuel started collecting the data in 2006.'"

From Patch New York. "Long Island City rents are dipping as landlords struggle to find tenants during the coronavirus pandemic, and prices could keep dropping for the rest of the year. The extent of the discounts signals that lower rents are on the horizon, according to StreetEasy economist Nancy Wu. 'The growth in rental discounts is a strong indication that demand for apartments in NYC is declining overall,' Wu wrote. 'Though they've been rising for years, we could see NYC rents falling soon.'"

The San Mateo Daily News in California. "Rent costs are down in San Mateo, Redwood City, San Bruno, South San Francisco and other Bay Area locales from the year prior, according to a June report from Zumper. The price reductions are in line with trends across the nation. 'The fact that we’re seeing rents decrease at a time when growth normally speeds up is reflective of the continued uncertainty and economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic,' said Chris Salviati, analyst with online database Apartmentlist, in a report tracking dropping prices across the nation."

"Median housing sales prices in San Mateo County dropped from $1.76 million in May last year to $1.64 million to the same time this year, marking the only instance this year in which costs were reduced from 2019."

From KPIX 5 in California. "The decrease in Bay Area rental prices has been significant this year, especially in the most expensive cities. Some median prices have even dropped by double-digit percentages. New numbers show there’s been an exodus of residents who have better options. Renters are simply walking away from their leases. 'All of the normal things that we see as driving demand for rental housing in San Francisco have pretty much dried up,' said J.J. Panzer, President of Real Management Company."

"In June, rent prices year-over-year dropped more than 9% in San Francisco, Mountain View more than 15%, and Cupertino down 14% according to Zumper."

The Union Tribune in California. "Within the next week, David Marino will list nearly 300,000 square feet of sublease office space in Sorrento Mesa that current tenants no longer need. For Marino, a principal at the Hughes Marino commercial real estate brokerage firm that specializes in representing tenants, these subleases are an early wave of what he expects to be a tsunami of unwanted office space flooding the market in coming months in the wake of COVID-19 shutdowns."

"Social distancing, plunging revenue and layoffs already have wreaked havoc on certain commercial real estate sectors, such as hotels, malls, movie theaters and non-essential retail. Office space could be next. That could create ballooning supply starting this summer — a surplus that might make the Tech Wreck of 2000 and the Great Recession of 2008-09 'look like a rounding error,' said Marino. 'This is going to be much more like the early 1990s when we had the Savings & Loan crisis and over-development of office buildings and foreclosures,' he said."

"Renegotiating existing lease terms is more difficult. Lenders typically must sign off before a landlord can offer significant lease modifications. 'Banks and insurance companies are generally willing to be reasonable about reviewing renegotiated leases, and to even modify loan terms in some cases,' said Norm Miller, the Hahn chair of Real Estate Finance at the University of San Diego School of Business. 'But the commercial mortgage-backed securities money, that is thousands of investors that bought this pool of mortgages, and it is pretty much impossible to modify those loans.'"

"If employees must spread out because of the pandemic, there is less utilization per square foot. 'It’s like overripe bananas at the store,' said Marino, the tenant broker. 'What are overripe bananas worth? Nothing. Tenants who were willing to pay $4 or $5 per foot for something …. right now see very little value to those leases. They are in contracts that they wish they could get out of.'"

The Deseret News in Utah. "At the beginning of 2020, Utah housing experts were predicting the median home price in Salt Lake County would top $400,000 for the first time. Now three months after the state first shut down businesses in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, one economist is rethinking those rosy metrics from the state’s once red-hot economy. 'The COVID-19 recession will cut residential construction and existing home sales by 8% to 10%, depending on the type of housing,' James Wood, Ivory-Boyer senior fellow at the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, said."

"Wood said the cost to rent in Utah is likely to decrease due to tenants being forced to relocate because of income and job losses. 'The rental market is bound to see higher vacancy rates. Over the last four or five years, the vacancy rates in Wasatch Front markets have consistently been below 4%,' he explained. 'In recent months, however, rates had started to move higher due to the completion of several new projects. The increasing supply of rental units, combined with a rising unemployment rate, will put pressure on the market and inevitably push vacancy rates higher.'"

From Community Impact in Texas. "ApartmentData President Bruce McClenny has served with the company for the past 25 years. The organization, which has been in business since 1986, has a call center based in Houston that works to reach out to every apartment complex in its database on a monthly basis. How has COVID-19 impacted rental rates across the industry?"

"'The absorption is down. There's less people moving around. They're staying in place. So we're not seeing as many leases happen so because of a lack of demand, people staying at home, in place—that directly impacts rent, so we've seen rents come down, especially in the [Class] A spaces where there's a lot of availability. There's 21,000 [Class A] units across Houston that are in the leasing stage, so that brings pressure on the rents in the A spaces. We're starting to see the Class C—the affordable, workforce housing—rents flatten out.'"

The Journal News. "The National Multifamily Housing Council recently surveyed its 11.5 million professionally managed apartments and the results are giving us a look at the effect of COVID-19 on performance. The data is showing that the price buyers are willing to pay is lower than the price sellers are willing to take, creating fewer transactions when compared to pre-COVID-19 levels. Although we have few transactions to evaluate, we are seeing a discount of 5% to 10% on pricing compared to what we saw prior to the pandemic on larger apartment assets."