A report from the Sun Sentinel. "The housing market in South Florida has been booming for much of 2020 — sparked by low interest rates, high demand and low inventory — but real estate experts say they consider the trend a bubble that probably won’t last. 'We’re in a huge bubble type thing right now,' said Teri Arbogast of Keller Williams Partners Pembroke Pines. 'I already put a house on the market, and I already got a full price offer and I haven’t even shown it yet. The last time I saw this happen was in 2004, 2005.'"

"Dawn Williams Bobo with Prag Realtors in Tamarac said she also sees buyers leveraging the low interest rates to make overpriced offers. 'It’s enabled a lot of buyers to be in a position to purchase more than what they were typically approved for due to the adjustment in the interest rate,' Williams Bobo said."

"The condo market in Broward is favoring buyers for the moment, with sellers willing to make more concessions. The condo market has only increased slightly year over year — about 6 percent — which agents say is probably due to pandemic-related concerns over shared amenities such as elevators and gyms. 'It’s pretty shocking to see houses fly off the shelve and condos just kind of stay stagnant,' said Gianpierre Giusti of the Meza Group in Fort Lauderdale. 'It’s a market where people will over pay for houses and under pay for condos.'"

From Bloomberg. "A $50 billion bond market once heralded as the future of housing finance has been stuck in limbo since the start of the coronavirus crisis, and now proposed regulatory changes have left investors worrying that they might be left holding the bag. At issue are so-called credit-risk-transfer securities offered by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They are tied to Fannie and Freddie’s mortgage-backed securities and pay investors principal and interest as long as the borrowers don’t default."

"Fannie hasn’t issued the bonds since the pandemic began, and the company’s executives are privately telling some investors that it has doubts about the market’s longterm viability. Freddie, meanwhile, has resumed issuing the bonds after a pause near the start of the pandemic. The lack of activity is starting to worry investors that they will be saddled with securities that are akin to museum pieces that no one is interested in buying."

"The uncertainty stems from a proposal by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mark Calabria that many say would make it uneconomic in some cases for Fannie and Freddie to keep issuing the securities. Calabria’s plan would reduce the capital relief the companies get by issuing CRT by about half in some circumstances, according to Chris Helwig, a managing director at Amherst Pierpont Securities."

"'There are pretty substantial, existential risks to credit-risk transfers if Calabria goes through with these plans,' said Structured Finance Association Chief Executive Officer Michael Bright."

The Wall Street Journal. "A housing crisis centered on the vast apartment and home-rental markets is emerging in the U.S., threatening to send millions of renters into eviction and leave landlords short billions of dollars. A study of unemployed workers released last week by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia calculated outstanding rent debt would reach $7.2 billion before the close of 2020. Moody’s Analytics estimates that it could reach nearly $70 billion by year-end if there is no additional stimulus spending. The economic-research firm calculated that 12.8 million Americans would then owe an average of $5,400 from missed payments."

"Even the larger figure would be far less than what was lost when the $1.3 trillion subprime-mortgage bubble burst, leading to a national wave of defaults and foreclosures. But the tens of millions of people potentially caught in a web of home-rental debt and eviction would far exceed the 3.8 million homeowners who were foreclosed on in 2007-2010."

"While many landlords have let tenants continue to occupy units without paying all of their rent by establishing payment plans, there are doubts about how many tenants will ever be able to pay back all of what they owe. 'Am I concerned that some tenants will leave me holding the bag? Yes,' said Robert Nelson, a New York City landlord who owns middle-income apartment buildings. 'But what choice do we have?'"

The Times Standard in California. "The housing market grew ever-more strong for sellers in September as the amount of single-family homes on the market in Humboldt County continued to fall and prices continued to rise. The shrinking housing market has allowed new homes coming onto the market to be listed for more than they typically would be worth according to Kessler Team realtor Scott Stephens, who said the inflation has made it tough to give purchasers an accurate picture of what they are buying."

"'The hardest thing for me to do right now as a Realtor is to answer the question of what a home is worth versus what its price is,' Stephens said. 'The rules aren’t the same anymore right now. With the high demand, higher-than-normal list prices and multiple offers being made on a home, it’s tough to advise clients on what to do — we don’t have a crystal ball.'"

From Palm Springs Life in California. "It seems unlikely, but the coronavirus has created ideal conditions for a dramatic spike in home sales in the Coachella Valley. Michael McDonald of Market Watch LLC, asserts the market conditions are organic, unlike the housing bubble of 2004–2006. 'That market was driven by an overuse of variable-rate mortgages,' he says. 'When interest rates started going back, we had a reset problem, and the only solution at the time was foreclosure. Now, we have forbearance to keep people in their homes.'"

"'It would not be unusual for a situation like this to generate 10 to 20 percent price gains over a year or year-and-a-half,' McDonald says. 'That, by the way, would help solve our inventory problem.'"

"The commercial real estate picture looks much different, as more retail and office spaces become available to a fewer number of businesses with diminishing needs. 'Commercial real estate is going to be facing a demand challenge,' says Joe Jack Wallace of CVEP, who takes a wider view of the issue. 'The downside is, of course, lower commercial real estate values and the reduced tax base that comes with that. This will be a challenge to commercial property owners and the financial institutions that lend to them.'"

The Wall Street Journal. "More lenders are starting to deliver a stern new message to delinquent mall owners: time to pay up. In one recent example, lenders to the Saks Fifth Avenue store at Miami’s Dadeland Mall are foreclosing on the store owner after it defaulted on its mortgage payment in April, and hasn’t paid since, according to court documents filed at a court in Miami-Dade County. The $846 million mortgage is securitized with collateral from 10 Saks stores and 24 Lord & Taylor stores around the country, meaning the lender could seize these properties through the foreclosure process."

"Some lenders are now worried about fast-falling retail property valuations, which around the country are plunging by as much as 75%. Lenders say they are compelled to conduct foreclosure sales to recoup what is owed them. 'Every step of the way, everyone is fighting each other to see who will take the loss,' Jim Costello, senior vice president of research firm Real Capital Analytics."

"Some mall landlords have given up. The owners of Park Plaza Mall in Little Rock, Ark., ended loan modification talks in the spring and turned the keys over to their lender. The mall was valued at $33.1 million when the negotiations collapsed, down from $142 million in 2011, according to real-estate data firm Trepp LLC. A number of owners are looking at converting malls to residential buildings or warehouses, which are more in demand. But that could result in valuations on the redeveloped properties falling by 60% to 90% compared with pre-Covid-19 levels, according to research analysts at Barclays PLC."

From Cleveland.com in Ohio. "A New York-based lender who gave a $171.5 million loan to the developers of Pinecrest in Orange now owns Northeast Ohio’s newest shopping and dining center, thanks to financial issues related to the coronavirus pandemic. The transfer happened 'deed in lieu of foreclosure,' Orange Mayor Kathy Mulcahy said. This signals that the developers gave up the property instead of facing a foreclosure lawsuit."

"The shopping center, which opened in 2018, sits on 58 acres off Interstate 271 at Harvard Road. It features 400,000 square feet of high-end retail space, 160,000 square feet of office space, 87 apartment units, a park, a hotel and movie theater."

From WTOP News on Washington DC. "Apartment rents in the D.C. area remain some of the highest in the nation — but they’re slowly coming down as landlords seek to lure tenants. Zillow reports that reflects what is happening in mostly large, expensive cities across the nation. Rent erosion has landlords responding to a drop in demand and rising vacancies by lowering rental rates."

"Apartment vacancies are rising in big cities because remote work makes it possible for renters to relocate to less expensive places. But vacancies also are rising as a direct result of the high unemployment rate brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among younger workers in the service industries. 'Their employment, their hours and their earnings have all been hammered, which makes it a lot harder for them to afford their own places,' said Jeff Tucker, economic research analyst at Zillow. 'So a lot of those folks are moving home. We’ve seen more than two million young people move back in with their parents.'"

"In addition to adjusting rents, more landlords are now offering concessions to fill vacant apartments. 'We saw the share of rental listings on our site that were offering concessions more than double this year,' Tucker said. 'What that really means in practical terms in most cases is one or two months of free rent. On a yearlong lease, that’s better than a 10% discount.'"

From Patch Virginia. "Do Overpriced Listings Sell? Check out how many Old Town Alexandria Sellers needed to drop the price and provide closing costs to sell! For this analysis, we looked at the homes that sold in the past 90 days and reviewed the price drop information. A vast majority of homes had no price drop, but there were some homes that required a single price adjustment before closing. Additionally, we analyzed the homes that received closing costs from the seller and the impact a single price drop has on homes receiving closing costs."

"In the past 90 days, there was a total of 200 homes that sold in Old Town Alexandria, VA with no price drop and 40 homes that sold with a single price adjustment before selling. Home requiring no price drop sold for over $10K above their list price, had a median days of market of 5 days and 19% of these homes received closing costs. Homes requiring a single price drop had a median days of market of 33 days and 38% of these homes received closing costs. Furthermore, for the homes requiring a single price drop, these homes went under contract in about 4 days after the price drop."

"This data reinforces the market statistics and market forces of supply and demand…homes that are priced right, sell faster and sell for more. Overpriced homes take longer to sell and ultimately sell for less and it is only after the price is adjusted down to closer to their market value do they go under contract in roughly the same number of days that a correctly priced home sells for."