A report from the Oklahoman. "The Hill, an upscale housing development in Deep Deuce, was due for completition in 2008. The project has gone through more than a dozen extensions. Bill Canfield is in default of his agreement with the Urban Renewal Authority and a new developer will be sought to complete the neighborhood. The Hill is one of the ritziest residential developments downtown, featuring several million-dollar homes with most others having sold at over $400,000. But the highest point of The Hill remains barren."

From Bisnow Boston on Massachusetts. "Boston’s newest luxury living tower is making its long-awaited debut in a tenuous, coronavirus pandemic-afflicted multifamily market. The HYM Investment Group and development partner National Real Estate Advisors have opened The Sudbury, a 480-foot, 46-story tower at the center of downtown. The year-over-year median condo sales price in Boston was down 0.2% in November, and active listings were up 62.8%, according to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors."

"Bozzuto is managing the Sudbury's apartments, where rents range from $2,350 for 647 SF studios to $11,855 for 1,547 SF, three-bedroom units. A deal of up to three months' free rent is advertised on the building's website."

The Real Deal Miami on Florida. "Nest Seekers International has been falsely claiming exclusivity on a number of listings in Miami, and in some cases feeding that information to Zillow and Realtor.com, an investigation by The Real Deal reveals. The New York-based brokerage, led by founder and CEO Eddie Shapiro, has a number of listings on its website that are labeled 'exclusive,' which state that 'This is a Nest Seekers Exclusive Listing.' However, in many cases, the listings belong to another brokerage, have already been sold, or have not been listed by the developer."

"'It appears that these brokers are misrepresenting the truth in an effort to fraudulently drive traffic to their business,' said Josh Migdal, a partner at Miami-based law firm Mark Migdal & Hayden. 'This ultimately could result in losses to the appropriate brokers and losses to the buyer and seller who could pay additional commissions and/or improper prices for the home.'"

"Chris Zoller, an agent who sits on the Miami Association of Realtors board of directors, compared the public listings sites like Zillow.com and Realtor.com to the 'Wild, Wild West' and said listings agents should be diligent about protecting their listings. Brokers were alarmed to hear that Nest Seekers has been claiming exclusivity and sharing listings without permission, and planned to contact the brokerage immediately. Zoller said it was 'robbery.'"

"'It is unfortunate that sometimes an unscrupulous player can slip under the radar and lay claim to something that is not true,' Zoller said. 'We [South Florida] are the capital of fraud. We seem to allow more fraud than most other parts of the nation, and it’s really scary.'"

From Oregon Public Broadcasting. "With Oregon expected to continue a statewide eviction ban for at least six more months, three landlords are asking a judge to end the policy. 'Plaintiffs are being legally compelled to provide, for some indeterminate amount of time that has already stretched beyond 18 months, housing, utilities, and other services associated with habitability for large numbers of this state’s population — and Plaintiffs will likely bear the cost of this state-run public benefit program entirely on their own,' the lawsuit said."

"'The practical reality is that the tenants who cannot afford to pay one month’s rent now will be highly unlikely to afford the total past-due rent that will continue to accumulate each month until the State declares the ‘end’ of the statewide emergency,' the lawsuit said. 'Plaintiffs’ ‘right’ to unpaid rent is little more than an illusion.'"

From Bisnow New York. "The city is on pace to see $8.4B in building sales volume in 2020, a nearly 70% drop off the 10-year average, per Avison Young’s latest data. That figure represents a 50% decrease from last year. Pricing and values are another matter — brokers point to reductions of as much as 30% in some cases, as well as their growing concerns that investors are turning their backs on the city in favor of more business-friendly parts of the country."

"'The landlords already were taking a bloodbath on their valuations,' Meridian Capital Group Managing Director Shallini Mehra said, pointing to rent reform legislation that was passed by the state government last year. Now, the general feeling among investors is that prices have further to fall. 'We have a lot of landlords who bought in the last five to seven years, and there is a certain amount of devaluation that has gone on,' Mehra said. 'Maybe they want to exit the New York City market and they just want to be in other markets because of the rent laws or they’ve just decided to cut their losses.'"

"Avison Young Head of Tri-State Investment Sales James Nelson said that, on the whole, some of the investment sales pricing in the city hasn’t been seen in a decade. 'If you take the second quarter and the third quarter and you compare it to 2019, the price of land dropped 30%, multifamily was [down] 29%, office and retail [down] 24%,' Nelson added. 'The only thing we have to compare this to is 2009, when sales volume dropped 90% from 2007."

"'It was a year in which the pandemic converted a 53-monthlong correction in investment sales from a volume correction to a value correction,' said JLL New York Investment Sales Chairman Bob Knakal, adding that October 2015 is when the bull market officially ended. Buyers offered less and sellers have balked at their offers this year, so Knakal expects this sales volume to hit a cyclical low in 2020. 'I thought the savings and loan crisis was the worst thing I ever saw, and that was only 47 months,' he said. 'This is 62 months now and not over yet.'"

The San Francisco Business Journal on California. "With just 2.8 million square feet leased to date, San Francisco’s commercial leasing activity in 2020 is down about 75% compared to the previous year, reaching a low that the city has not seen in 20 years. Only four direct leases over 100,000 square feet were signed, and all were renewals."

"'The majority of the leasing activity decline had to do with the lack of expansion activity in the market this year. That’s really what drove leasing activity in 2019,' said Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's Tech Insights Center. 'Last year about 80% of the top 20 largest leases were expansion related. This year it was only half that amount. And the majority of that expansion activity would have been either signed or initiated pre-Covid.'"

From Socket Site in California. "With the average asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco having dropped 23 percent over the past year to under $2,700 a month and the average asking rent for a studio having dropped even more, the weighted average asking rent for an apartment in the city, which currently measures around 2.3 bedrooms when counting a studio as having one, has dropped to $3,100 a month. It’s now $1,000 a month or 24 percent cheaper than in January of this year and nearly 31 percent below a 2015-era peak of closer to $4,500 a month."

"And despite the precipitous drop in rents, resultant pro forma cash flows for investment properties and inputs for rent versus buy calculations, there are still over three times as many apartments currently listed for rent in San Francisco than there were at the same time last year with an overall vacancy rate that’s ticked up to around 10 percent (and climbing)."

The Los Angeles Times in California. "One can even detect hand-wringing from this side of the state line. California’s population growth in the year ended July 1 fell to 0.05%, a level not seen since 1900. The trend was attributed in part to a 'continued exodus' of residents exasperated by the cost of living. The Sacramento Bee mined the same data and pronounced California 'no longer a boom state.'"

"The flattening out of population growth looks like a 'sea change' in historical terms, observes Hans Johnson, a demographer at the Public Policy Institute of California. 'For a Western state to join the ranks of states with zero population growth,' Johnson told me, 'is something we haven’t seen before.'"

"Lurking within all these statistics, to be sure, are grounds for concern about California’s future. The cost of housing is a persistent and intensifying drag on growth. It’s a challenge that the state’s leaders and voters have been utterly unable to get their arms around. From the days of the Gold Rush and the earliest years of statehood, visitors to California have noticed dross mixed with the glitter."

"In an 1855 screed titled, 'The Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction,' a transplant from North Carolina named Hinton R. Helper cursed the state’s 'rottenness and its corruption, its squalor and its misery, its crime and its shame.' Horace Greeley, famous for having counseled young men to 'Go West,' bemoaned the spiritual and civic poverty of the Golden State following his own sole visit, in 1859. 'In the course of several hundred miles’ travel through the vest settled portions of this state,' he wrote, 'I remember having seen but two school-houses outside of the cities and villages.'"