Two reports from the Real Deal on Florida. "Ed Brown, former Patrón Spirits CEO, sold his oceanfront Hillsboro Beach mansion at a loss, for $16.5 million. Luxury spec home developer Mark Timothy built the home in 2017, the same year the Browns bought it for $20 million. The Browns aimed high with their initial listing, putting the property on the market in February 2019 for $27 million. In January, the asking price dropped to $26 million, and eventually fell to $23 million."

"Miami-based Condo.com founder Richard Swerdlow and South Florida developer Bruce Goldstein are partnering to launch an online platform for bulk condo deals, The Real Deal has learned. They’re betting on the growing distress of condo markets across the country and developers’ desire to keep their offers confidential."

"The veiled listings will also allow sellers to 'avoid the appearance of distress to the financial markets,' while offering discounts of up to 50 percent, said Goldstein. The discounts aren’t available to end users, and the goal is to appeal to bulk buyers. The website has about $100 million worth of listings and about $500 million in the pipeline in major U.S. markets, as well as in Latin America. Live listings include an 85-unit bulk condo in Miami and a 185-unit condo deal in Chicago, and the partners plan to list a deal in New York City."

"Swerdlow and Goldstein expect distress to accelerate as the pandemic continues. Developers will need to sell in bulk to avoid having their property foreclosed on or having their loans enter special servicing. Once distressed pricing becomes public, retail sales can fall apart. 'The last thing they want is the broker to have access — and blast it to the media,' Swerdlow said."

From Real Estate Weekly on New York. "Thousands of housing providers are struggling and some property owners are in dire straits, according to a survey of the members of the Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP). Without help from the government, more than 15 percent percent of respondents say they do not think they’ll be able to make property tax or water and sewer payments in January. 'We are in the eighth month of depressed rent collection and tens of thousands of people have fled the city leaving apartments vacant. While some owners can sustain this type of hit, more than one in ten cannot—and that is a crisis for affordable housing in New York,' said Jay Martin, executive director of CHIP."

"The reported vacancy rate among respondents ticked up to 12.81 percent from 12.55 percent in September. Survey respondents say their vacancy rate in February, before the pandemic, was 3.02 percent. The mass exodus from New York City has left thousands of units vacant and available for rent, but there are also units that have become vacant and need significant renovations before they can be rented. According to CHIP, in many instances, property owners do not have the capital or cannot secure funding from lenders to fix up these apartments and bring them back to market, especially if the units are rent regulated and have low legal rents."

The Honolulu Civil Beat in Hawaii. "Last fall, Selina Lewis and her husband rented their 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom house in Kapolei to a family of four for $2,800 a month. The first sign of trouble came in April, when the rent was due but went unpaid. Lewis waited a few days, and then sent an email to ask what was happening. The tenants responded, saying that one spouse had their hours cut at their job, and the other was immunocompromised and couldn’t work. They said they could pay part of the rent later in the month."

"The rent was late again in May and June. The rent checks stopped in mid-July, and so did the communication from the tenants. Meanwhile, the bills were piling up for Lewis and her husband. They have the monthly mortgage on both the house they live in and their rental house. In the middle September, the Lewises saw their tenants moving out."

"When she did enter the property, she found what every landlord dreads. The windows in the house had been left open and the wind and rain had come in, staining the carpet and damaging the blinds. The tenant had turned off the electricity but left food rotting inside the fridge. The house reeked of cat pee, though the lease specified 'no pets.' It looked like someone had started a fire in the toilet. The back yard was littered with beer bottles."

"Meanwhile, her daughter has looked up the former tenants on social media. They recently bought a food truck."

From Community Impact on Texas. "The Greater Houston region entered the last quarter of 2020 with office vacancies continuing to rise, although the region has been producing more commercial spaces, especially in the industrial sector, than are currently needed, said Patrick Jankowski, the senior vice president of research with the Greater Houston Partnership."

"'Whenever the economy enters a recession there is always a drop off in leasing activity, and office, industrial and retail space,' Jankowski said. 'The problem is we entered this downturn where we already had a glut in office and a development glut and warehouse/industrial that is going to make things worse than it would have been otherwise.'"

"Another sector facing a glut in the Houston region is multifamily housing, he said. 'We are overbuilding in multifamily,' Jankowski said. 'Over a two-year period, we’ll add close to 40,000 units to the market, and that’s about 40,000 more than we need.' Jankowski said a typical rule of thumb is every six jobs created in Houston absorb about one apartment unit. 'So you can see that to absorb what we just built we need to create over 200,000 jobs,' he said. 'And in this pandemic we are still down over 200,000 jobs.'"

The San Francisco Chronicle in California. "If you’re looking for a deal on an apartment rental, go to San Francisco. The city was No. 1 in September among U.S. cities for renters to find the best deals, according to Zumper. San Francisco’s rent plummeted 20% year-over-year, and 5% of rental listings offered move-in specials, according to the analysis. Two other Bay Area cities made the top 10 list: Oakland, at No. 6, and San Jose, at No. 7."

"'San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland have consistently been in the top 10 most expensive markets, so their rent prices had a lot of room to fall,' said Zumper spokesperson Crystal Chen. 'All three of their respective year-over-year rent price decreases were some of the largest in the nation.' Oakland saw a 14% drop in rent in September compared to last year, with 10% of listings offerings concessions. San Jose rents dropped 9% year-over-year, and 14% of listings offered concessions, which Chen said is most likely tied to new construction in the Silicon Valley city."

"'As people continue to migrate out of the pricey Bay Area cities to ride out the rest of the pandemic somewhere with more space and affordability, property owners are eagerly trying to fill vacancies, especially ahead of the holidays,' Chen said. 'So now the Bay Area is seeing deals like never before.'"

The Motley Fool on California. "San Francisco has been the city at the heart of the tech movement for many years. This has led to rising rents on both the residential and commercial sides, but the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically shifted that picture. According to data from CoStar Group, San Francisco office rents have dropped by 4% from March to September of this year, and new lease deals were down 81% year over year."

"Says Nima Wedlake, principal at Thomvest Ventures, a venture fund based in San Francisco: 'More than 3 million square feet of sublease inventory is available as of August, up from about 300,000 square feet in March. This glut of sublease inventory will certainly lead to a drop in rental rates, which had reached an all-time high prior to the pandemic. I expect that we'll experience a prolonged period of price declines in the office market.'"

"San Francisco's residential market is taking a hit as well, especially when it comes to rentals. Says Chris Lim, head of brand growth at @properties: 'With the advent of the global pandemic, we've seen a mass migration out of San Francisco into surrounding areas like Napa and Truckee. The hardest-hit areas have been SOMA and South Beach -- where there are mostly high-rise, loft, and condominium communities.'"

"You probably know that real estate has long been the playground for the rich and well connected. But in 2020 the barriers have come crashing down - and now it’s possible to build REAL wealth through real estate at a fraction of what it used to cost."

The Los Angeles Times in California. "One of the most complicated measures on California’s ballot this November is Proposition 19, which gives new property tax breaks to older homeowners, increases property taxes for those inheriting their parents’ properties and tacks on some tax relief for those affected by wildfires."

"The measure is the product of more than two years of work by the California Assn. of Realtors to give a larger tax incentive to homeowners 55 and older to move into new homes. The Realtors also were behind Proposition 5, a failed 2018 initiative that would have done the same thing. But Proposition 19 adds many other elements — notably a tax increase for the heirs of some homeowners — in an effort to make it more fiscally sound and palatable to voters."

"Also, the real estate industry stands to benefit from the increase in home sales that is expected as a result of the measure. State and national Realtor groups are funding the Proposition 19 campaign, contributing more than $37 million so far to secure its passage. Jeanne Radsick, president of the Realtors group, said that protecting Realtors’ interests was not a driving force behind the push for Proposition 19."

"'It is not about making money for the Realtors, for crying out loud,' she said. 'It’s about tax fairness for people who need help.'"

From Patch Newton in Massachusetts. "This 11,000 square foot estate that went on the market last year for a cool $7.9 million is still one of the most expensive homes in the Garden City, though the seller has knocked about $1.4 million off the listing price."

From Bisnow. "The coronavirus pandemic has hampered most co-living companies, Starcity CEO Jon Dishotsky said, but the pain has so far been much worse for some than others. Among the most severely impacted operators is HubHaus, which announced last month that it will shutter permanently. The Los Altos-based company came to manage over 1,000 bedrooms, many of which were in the Bay Area, but it told tenants and homeowners in September it couldn’t pay October rent and was shutting down, multiple outlets reported."

"It has taken 'a lot more hand-holding for potential new members,' but he said rents have started to rebound from 10% to 15% year-over-year reductions in each of its markets except San Francisco, which continues to see slackened demand but an occupancy rate of 92%. Plummeting rents in San Francisco as a whole have also been most pronounced for smaller units. Studio rents last month were down 31% year-over-year, according to Realtor, which has one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms in the city down 24.2% and 21.3%, respectively."

"Bungalow, another Bay Area-based co-housing company, warned some of its landlords in September it didn't intend to pay October rent, The Information reported last month. Bungalow CEO Andrew Collins said in a statement to Bisnow that the company is in a 'meaningfully better position than HubHaus' but still looking to renegotiate most of its leases."

"'We have seen substantial declines in the residential real estate market in our major cities: in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, rents are down between 15% and 25% versus their peak last year,' Collins said. 'As a result, we are asking a majority of homeowners to reformat our leases in a way that enables us to get through these difficult times together and provides additional upside for landlords once the markets rebound.'"

"Dishotsky, who said he thinks co-living has a long-term place as an affordable option for workers in urban cores, said he is less sure about the stability of the master-lease model compared with the ownership one. Both kinds have raised tens of millions in venture capital. 'You can certainly scale fast and create a quick pop in evaluation in the good times, but long term that will catch up to you,' he said. 'And I think that that’s, largely speaking, what happened.'"