It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "'If you’re thinking about selling your home, now is a great time to do it, work with a professional to make sure you get through it,' explains Rachel Sartain a Pinellas County Realtor. 'We’ve got stories of 200 viewings in two days, 10 offers coming through.' Also, if you've been laid off or have lost your job and need help paying the mortgage, furloughing payments is an option."

"Editor: Thank you for allowing me to write a follow-up to your article titled: 'Report: Havasu housing values most at risk.' As Chad Nelson states we have seen a 12.7% increase from last year in values. I agree with Mr. Nelson and would opine that we are currently in a bubble, which we all know will pop at some point. Jeanne Ketch: Mohave County Assessor."

"After setting a new California price record in February with the $165-million sale of his Beverly Hills mansion, media mogul David Geffen paid about half the original asking price — $125 million. On Beverly Park Circle, the onetime home of baseball home run king Barry Bonds sold or $4 million less than the $30-million asking price. Rapper Travis Scott, who bought a Beverly Hills Post Office-area home with partner Kylie Jenner last year, paid $18.5 million less than the original asking price. On Beverly Park Lane, developer and restaurateur George Santo Pietro sold his home to a trust for about half the original asking price — $38 million."

"Two-bedroom units selling for close to $2 million 'are a little soft.' Jing Fang, a broker associate with the Compass real estate firm who works mostly with condo buyers in San Francisco, added that 'sellers are pretty motivated. Otherwise they wouldn’t put their home on the market right now.' Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst for Compass added that the San Francisco rental market 'has been hammered by declining rent rates and increasing vacancy rates as newly unemployed residents leave the most expensive apartments in the country. Unemployment typically hits the rental market much harder than the for-sale market.'"

"If unemployment continues to rise, the 'ripple effect' will be felt throughout the housing market, Levine said."

"Whad’ya know: The rent was too damn high. Not only did 34.7 percent of all Manhattan rentals get a discount — a new high for that metric — but landlords in the borough also slashed a record 6.7 percent off asking rents. For instance, a studio at 145 W. 12th St. in the usually coveted neighborhood of Greenwich Village listed at the end of June for $2,700 a month, then decreased its price by 8 percent to $2,495 five days later. (It is still on the market for $2,000 following two further price chops.) "

"Colorado is seeing a surge of residents who can’t pay their rent because of layoffs, furloughs and pay reductions. Hundreds of tents are lined up behind the Stout Street Health Center at 21st and Stout streets, notes Cathy Alderman, vice president of communications and public policy at the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, while immediately behind them are two empty, brand-new, market-rate luxury apartment buildings. 'It’s so striking,' she says."

"In March, when I first searched through hundreds of Portland rentals, I noticed multiunit hosts were offering eye-popping discounts for long-term stays, as high as 50 percent or more off the nightly rate for month-long reservations. When the checkout dates neared at two of our rentals, I got similarly desperate-sounding calls from both hosts asking if we’d like to 'take things off Airbnb' and stay for another month. 'These hosts still have mortgages to pay on those homes, but they’re not making the revenue they otherwise would have through Airbnb,' says Makarand Mody, assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Hospitality Administration."

"'This lack of travel and tourism is already causing Airbnb hosts to slash their prices by more than 80% in some cities. If this goes on for much longer, a lot of these cash-strapped hosts will be forced to sell their properties,' financial analyst Austin Hankwitz told Money magazine."

"'We are definitely seeing more on the market than I have ever seen at this time of year,' said Claire Flewelling-Wyatt. The managing broker for the property management division of Pemberton Homes in Victoria, Flewelling-Wyatt says the shift in the market is due to a number of factors, including a flood of Airbnbs transitioning to long-term rentals. 'What we are seeing is there are more properties for rent and the rental rates are going down,' she said. 'We are seeing a lot more stressed out clients where they expected to purchase an investment property and get a pretty decent rent. And those rents, we are just not able to get them.'"

"Lenders are set to reduce the availability of mortgages, loans and other credit in the coming weeks despite greater demand from consumers. Mortgage and loan providers have told the Bank of England that the supply of these products will fall in the summer months owing to coronavirus pressures. 'Since we were hit by the Covid crunch, lending has dried up faster than it did during the financial crisis - and things are only going to get worse,' said Sarah Coles, from investment firm Hargreaves Lansdown."

"Rents in Dublin fell in April, May and June, with drops in costs also recorded outside Dublin, according to the Residential Tenancies Board. There is also some anecdotal evidence of properties that were being offered for short-term holiday hire more recently being offered for rent instead, increasing supply."

"The real estate sector is in the doldrums. Low foreign investments and pending projects are expected to slow growth by five to six per cent this year compared to 10 to 15 per cent a year ago, said Cambodia Valuers and Estate Agents Association president Chrek Soknim., 'The Covid-19 outbreak has resulted in unprecedented demand shocks, while the property market already appears well-saturated after almost a decade-long [of] construction and real estate boom,' the World Bank said in its latest economic update."

"In Mumbai, the G Block in the Bandra Kurla Complex, which has around 150 marquee residences, rarely had any vacancies before the Covid outbreak. Today, in the wake of expats packing their bags and heading home, it is witnessing a vacancy level of about 30 percent -- nearly one in three homes is empty. 'The expat rental business is almost dead,' said a broker active in Delhi’s tony Vasant Vihar area."

"In some markets, such as inner-city apartments in Melbourne, rents are being cut because of rising unemployment, oversupply, Airbnb property owners abandoning longer term leasing, and growing fears about long-term capital growth and income prospects. Danielle Chetcuti, City Residential’s senior property manager, says she is negotiating with landlords every week to reduce the rent of tenants no longer able to afford the original costs, which has the unintended consequence of encouraging other tenants to demand their landlords match the cut."

"One landlord, whose two-bedroom, one bathroom Docklands property has been on the market for about eight weeks, cut the weekly asking rent from about $540 to $200 for the next three months in a bid to attract a new tenant. 'It is getting worse because more tenants are losing their jobs,' she says about inner Melbourne’s rental and apartment investor outlook."

"In simple words a real estate bubble is a run up or upward trend in the pricing that is fuelled by demand, speculation and exuberant spending to the point of collapse. Here the position is exploited by speculators who create a fake demand in the market and make profits. This is the current scenario in Kashmir. In last five years the commercial real estate has grown many fold but the problem is that it is not backed up by demand."

"The commercial property prices are not fuelled by demand and the fundamentals of the business are not strong. Mostly these commercial projects are financed by these distressed banks. From even a investment point of view the commercial property in this business scenario will show no appreciation rather chances are more of depreciation. My apprehensions are that this is a bubble and it will burst soon in the manner there was housing bubble in America in 2000’s."

"In the summer of 1720, shares in the South Sea Co. and other leading stocks roared to all-time highs as speculators chased instant profits. Ever since, this sudden outbreak of stock trading has been known as 'the South Sea bubble.' Even faster than it inflated, it burst—and left us with lessons about human nature that reverberate today. By the end of 1720, these leading stocks had fallen between 81% and 96% from their peak."

"The losses were devastating because speculating had been so popular. King George I, half the members of Parliament, Sir Isaac Newton, the poet Alexander Pope, and countless merchants and tradesmen had speculated on the South Sea and other companies. They all were sucked in by a perfect magnetic storm: the rapid advent of newspapers, ready loans at low interest rates, and exciting narratives about technological innovation."

"Above all was the eternal human desire to be part of the in crowd, or what we today would call FOMO, fear of missing out. 'Our species is really a herd animal,' says Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician at the University of Minnesota who researches financial bubbles. In 1720, 'the scent of money was in the air like the breath of spring,' as the historian John Carswell put it. That June alone, 88 startups, most of them publicly traded, were launched in London. Fistfights broke out over the right to buy stock while it still could be had; speculators thronged London’s financial district to buy shares in any company, desperately pleading, 'we don’t care what it is.'"

"Financial bubbles are often cited as proof of irrationality, but what they prove is that investors are human. As one formerly cautious banker, throwing some of his own money into the South Sea, pointed out on June 18, 1720: 'When the rest of the world is mad we must imitate them in some measure.'"

"Two centuries later, the financial analyst Benjamin Graham wrote about the bull market that ended in the crash of 1929: 'Countless people asked themselves, ‘Why work for a living when a fortune can be made in Wall Street without working?' Graham added wryly, 'The ensuing migration from business into the financial district resembled the famous gold rush to the Klondike, with the not unimportant difference that there really was gold in the Klondike.'"