It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Record vacancies dropped Manhattan apartment rental prices to their lowest levels in seven years as tenants continued to flee the city. The number of apartment listings tripled from a year earlier to 15,923, the most since record-keeping began in 2006, according to appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. The vacancy rate reached 5.75%, a fifth straight month with a record. Studios saw the biggest decline in rents with the median price down 13% from a year ago to $2,350 per month. One-bedroom prices fell 11% to $3,195. By location, Northern Manhattan saw the biggest price decline with the median off 9.9% to $2,208. Prices on the West Side fell 9.6% to $3,300 and Downtown dropped 7.8% to $3,595."

"The big question for New York City, which is facing a population decline, higher crime rates and high unemployment, is whether prices can fall enough to lure residents back to the city. 'I don’t think we’re there yet,' said Steven James, CEO of Douglas Elliman’s New York City brokerage. 'I think we have a little ways to go. The consumer knows the landlords are on the ropes and they know they’ve got them.'"

"Rentals account for two-thirds of the apartments in Manhattan. As rents fall, and more apartments sit empty, the pain could begin to cascade down to smaller, less capitalized landlords and to mortgage lenders and banks. It could also start to impact property tax revenue — which is the largest source of revenue for New York City — as landlords don’t have rental income to pay their taxes. 'The chain reaction is going to be difficult, especially for newer landlords that haven’t been through something like this before,' James said."

"The rental market in Boston has softened amid a glut of apartments. Rents have fallen 12% in Boston over the past year, according to Apartment List. They have fallen 9% since the pandemic started in March. Other high-rent cities such as San Francisco, New York and Washington. D.C., are in the same predicament as Boston. Boston Pads has more than 6,000 apartment listings on its website, a gain of more than 366% versus the 1,289 that were on the site in September 2019, according to CEO Demetrios Salpoglou. The company’s real-time vacancy rate has surged more than 730% since the pandemic struck in March."

"'A lot of landlords have dropped last month’s rent,' Salpoglou said. 'They’ve dropped security deposits. They have added one month’s free rent, two months free rent. Yesterday I saw a luxury building offer three months of free rent.'"

"San Francisco’s residential real estate market saw brisk activity from July through September with a steep increase in both sales and inventory, as a significant jump in buyers was not enough to keep up with the deluge of new condos and homes flooding the marketplace, according to Compass. The number of listings is at a 15-year high, with a 10-month inventory for condos in some neighborhoods. Comparing September to the same month last year, the number of price reductions was up 172% for houses and condos combined. Of the price reductions, 80% were of condos."

"'The issue is the inventory is increasing so much faster than the sales rate,' said Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst for Compass. 'Any time you have this relatively huge overhang of supply, and demand is stable, you are going to see price reductions.'"

"Opendoor, a digital home buyer and seller, received a $4.8 billion valuation when it went public three weeks ago, and it is the largest iBuyer in the U.S., based on market share — but 2020 isn’t expected to be a winning sales year. 'If you look at Opendoor’s numbers, they projected almost negative 50% [-49%] year-over-year growth in 2020. That seems like a bigger loss than what I would have expected,' said Sumant Sridharan, COO of Homelight. Instead of risking entering a booming but unpredictable market, Opendoor and other iBuyers will take losses through the end of the year."

"1199 Seymour St., No. 2402, Vancouver. Asking price: $669,000. Selling price: $660,000. The seller, who sometimes rented the unit out, was looking at upsizing to another home downtown. Listing agent Nicolas Blachette says sellers are responding to changes in the market, such as higher insurance premiums and fewer tenants. 'Some investors are selling due to rental rates going down due to higher inventory,' Mr. Blachette says."

"It’s a pretty good time to be renting a posh London pad. The price to lease a home in the capital’s wealthiest areas slumped by an annual 8.1% in September, the steepest in more than 10 years, according to broker Knight Frank. Landlords are flooding the market with short-term rentals as tourists stay away from the capital, and more owners are opting to rent out properties amid the pandemic uncertainty. The pain for owners in London’s priciest districts will likely continue into the current quarter, with Knight Frank forecasting a 9% decline for the whole year."

"The economic impact of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak has battered the housing market, which has seen purchases plummet to their lowest levels in nearly two decades, according to a Finance Ministry report. The number of sales has not been so low since 2003, when violence from the Palestinian Second Intifada decimated the economy. The downturn was most keenly felt in the center of the country, with Tel Aviv seeing a 33.6% drop in the volume of purchases and reaching its lowest level since tracking began in the early 2000s."

"As of Sunday, 936,712 Israelis were unemployed in total — almost a quarter of the workforce, which numbers some 4 million — including 595,667 who were furloughed."

"Residential buy-to-let investors beware: South Africa’s flat vacancy rates spiked to 11% in the third quarter of 2020, from 7% in the prior quarter. 'All the major cities now have vacancy rates in the double digits, with Durban and Cape Town the worst off,' according to the latest Rode Report. 'We are sitting with a large number of vacant flats and an even bigger list of tenants in arrears with rental payments,' Rode quotes one of its Cape Town survey respondents as saying. 'Job losses are at record highs, and many South Africans have also experienced salary cuts. But it’s not only about Covid‐19. Let’s not forget the economy was already in a recession before the virus emerged in South Africa in March,' Kobus Lamprecht, head of research at Rode & Associates, notes in the report."

"Sydney's property market may be in worse shape than the latest price data suggests on account of sellers withholding or delaying 'bad' sales and auction results. Two experts told The Sydney Morning Herald values had likely fallen by as much as 5 to 10 per cent since April, obscured by a decrease in the level of sales data being published. Stefan Trueck, co-director of the Centre for Risk Analytics at Macquarie University, estimated that Sydney property prices may have already fallen by up to 6 per cent since April - double the estimates from official price data."

"Professor Trueck said auction results were less likely to be reported during the COVID-19 crisis, and calculated about 60 per cent of results were made public in the past two months compared to almost 80 per cent in the October to November 2019 period. 'A lot of information on property prices is very much backward-looking and never up-to-date,' he said. 'By not having information on recent 'bad' sales, purchasers are more likely to accept price expectations closer to 'old prices' from before May 2020 for comparable properties when buying a house.'"

"Martin North, principal of Digital Finance Analytics, agreed 'prices are indeed falling more than reported' because of delays in reporting sales or withheld results. Mr North estimated apartment prices had fallen about 10 per cent and houses about 5 per cent, but there were 'big differences' across locations. 'I think many of the numbers being quoted by industry insiders are too optimistic,' he said."

"Economist Jason Murphy said CoreLogic's model is 'a bit of a black box and that encourages constant speculation about it being wrong.' 'They say they get prices in a timely manner, to overcome the fact prices are withheld,' he said. 'Perhaps they do. But are there exceptions? We can't be certain because it is a proprietary product.'"

"Professor Trueck said recession, rising unemployment, lack of migration and people wary of borrowing large amounts of money were all reasons to be sceptical about the 'so-called soft landing.' 'I think real estate agents are far too optimistic, but this is probably not surprising, since they want to sell houses for the highest possible price,' he said."

"Citadel CEO Ken Griffin has paid more than $1 billion on a cache of ultraluxury homes from London to New York. Real-estate industry veterans view the spate of deals with a combination of wonder and bafflement. Why pay record-breaking sums for all these homes at a time when many speculate that the market was at its peak?"

"Last year, Mr. Griffin grabbed headlines by closing on a deal he initially made in 2015 to pay about $238 million for an apartment in 220 Central Park South. Real-estate insiders believe the value of Mr. Griffin’s condo likely has suffered the effects of an oversupply of residential inventory along Billionaires’ Row. He decided to buy the units 'at the height of the market in 2015,' said appraiser Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel. But the market 'isn’t what it was.'"

"Also in 2015, Mr. Griffin purchased a pair of apartments at the top of Faena House, a then under-construction condominium in Miami Beach, for $60 million. Though they have not yet been combined, the resulting penthouse is often cited as the most expensive unit ever sold in Miami. Since then, the Miami condo market has taken a nosedive amid a flood of new inventory, and prices at the building have suffered. Some of the big names who have tried to sell their units have taken significant losses. Art dealer Larry Gagosian sold his apartment at the building for $12 million in 2017, a loss of nearly $1 million, and Mr. Black sold his unit at the building for $12.5 million, far less than the $16.5 million he paid, records show."

Mr. Griffin tried his own luck selling his unit in 2016, listing it for $73 million, but didn’t attract a buyer. The property has since been taken off the market. 'They thought they could get in early and get out early, but these out-of-towners got snookered,' said Peter Zalewski , a principal with real-estate consulting firm Condo Vultures. He added that Mr. Griffin’s unit has likely lost further value since then. While neighboring areas like Palm Beach have seen an enormous uptick in deal flow since the pandemic began, high-rise buildings in Miami Beach are still suffering, he said."

"'This is like a worst-case scenario,' he said. 'Not only did people overpay to be in that building, now you have this movement away from high-rise living.'"