A report from Bisnow on Georgia. "With government support for embattled workers evaporating, apartment rent collections are worsening as the year comes to a close. 'In November, it came crashing. We saw the entire momentum shift,' The RADCO Cos. CEO Norman Radow said during Bisnow's multifamily digital summit. 'I think we're starting to see parts of the economy shut down, and we're starting to feel the brunt of that.'"

"Apartment landlords like RADCO, which owns nearly 17,000 apartments across eight states, faced more difficulty getting renters to pays as the U.S. job market weakened and some governments renewed shelter-in-place orders."

The Puget Sound Business Journal in Washington. "Lots of people moved out of Seattle this year, mostly young professionals with an average age of 30 and a median income of $63,054, according to RentCafé. This year there were 24% fewer tenants looking for apartments in Seattle, which saw the volume of rental applications fall 11% compared to 2019. Less demand pushed Seattle's average rental rate down 8.5% year-over-year, the nation's third steepest behind San Francisco (-17.3%) and Manhattan (-10.8%)."

"RentCafé examined renter activity from three angles: people moving out of a particular city, renters moving within a city and tenants moving into a city. Eighteen of the 30 largest cities saw more renters leaving compared to 2019, with half of the cities, including Seattle, registering more pronounced numbers of people moving out of the city rather than moving in."

"In Seattle, the number of people moving out was 15% higher. That's the fifth-highest in the country; Detroit topped the list with a 36% increase. The number of renters moving into Seattle is down 24%, which is the second biggest drop behind San Francisco's decline of 31%."

From KQED in California. "KQED talked to seasoned tenants' rights attorney Joseph Tobener and Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco Executive Director Fred Sherburn-Zimmer for their advice on how best to negotiate down rent. 'I think it would be foolish for any tenant not to ask for their rent to be lowered right now,' Sherburn-Zimmer said."

"While there has been a lot of noise in the news about tech workers fleeing the Bay Area and causing rents to fall — sometimes by as much as 35% — that data only tells half the story, Tobener said. 'Here’s the biggest misconception people have right now: that housing is scarce and rent is dropping,' he said. 'That’s not universally true.'"

"Instead, he said, vacancies are often concentrated in 'those sky-rise apartments' in places like downtown San Francisco. Plummeting rents in a city's pricey urban cores can make it look like rent is dropping more than it is in, say, San Francisco's more moderately priced Sunset District."

The Los Angeles Times in California. "In L.A.’s over-the-top spec market, the only thing bigger than the homes are the price tags — and eventually, the price cuts. The latest example spans 34,000 square feet on an acre in Bel-Air, where celebrity plastic surgeon Raj Kanodia was seeking $180 million for his massive spec mansion in 2018. With no takers in two years, he just dropped the price to $99 million, down 45% from his astronomical asking price."

"Spec building is the epitome of high-risk, high-reward, with luxury developers erecting some of the largest houses in Southern California without a buyer lined up and slapping on price tags that regularly top $100 million. If they can’t find a buyer, tax bills add up quickly; as of last year, The Times reported that there were 12 properties in L.A. County with an annual property tax bill of more than $1 million."

"This often leads to dramatic price cuts, and Kanodia is far from the first to significantly lower his ask. Unica, a Spanish spec villa of 41,000 square feet, hit the market for $100 million before relisting for $78 million in September. In 2016, Bruce Makowsky offered his 38,000-square-foot mansion for $250 million, making it the priciest listing in the country, before eventually selling it three years later for $94 million. Coincidentally, Makowsky’s place sits right next door to Kanodia’s."

The Toronto Star in Canada. "Rents in the city of Toronto continued to tumble in November — down 20 per cent year over year, according to the National Rent Report. Rents for one-bedroom apartments have declined in Toronto every month since January, says the report. 'If you’re a tenant and you’re trying to time the market, we’re thinking maybe the end of February is the time for you to really narrow in on finding a place,' said said Ben Myers, principal of Bullpen Research and Consulting in Toronto."

"The 20 per cent average decline is based on all types of rental properties, including houses, condos and apartments from six-bedroom homes to studios, which Myers said have seen prices fall more than 20 per cent. Rents in the GTA across all property types were down 16.4 per cent year over year in November from $2,461 in 2019 to $2,056 last month. Rents in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) fell most severely in condos, where they plummeted 17.7 per cent year over year. Purpose-built apartments saw a 9.1 per cent drop."

The Daily Mail Australia. "Upmarket and gentrified inner-city suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne are in danger of seeing mortgage and rental stress levels more than double by the middle of next year. A report, commissioned by housing advocacy group Everybody's Home, has pinpointed areas where dual-income couples have been reduced to just one salary as a result of coronavirus shutdowns. Sydney's city and inner south area was expected to be Australia's worst-hit region with housing stress expected to surge by 159.5 per cent."

"Melbourne was in danger too with the affluent inner areas tipped to see a 126 per cent surge in housing stress, where households could barely pay their mortgage or rent as a result of losing an income. Sydney's wealthiest postcodes were also predicted to struggle, with housing pressures tipped to rise by 72.8 per cent in the eastern suburbs and by 72.4 per cent on the north shore, stretching from North Sydney to Hornsby."

"Report author and economist Angela Jackson, from Equity Economics, said couples in upmarket suburbs, with high house prices, had needed two incomes to pay off a mortgage and were now vulnerable. 'The reason Sydney's so bad is the structure of the economy,' she told Daily Mail Australia. 'Housing is so unaffordable that two people have to work and so there's a lot of two-income households compared to other parts of Australia.'"

From Inside the Magic on Florida. "The pandemic continues to create unrest in the local Orlando economy. Three hotels have been put up for auction due to the impacts of the ongoing pandemic. While these hotels may not always be your first choice to stay at during your next Orlando vacation, they do shed an important spotlight on the state of the tourism industry during the ongoing pandemic."

"As reported by the Orlando Business Journal, these hotels are Crown Plaza on Universal Blv., a Comfort Inn on Highway 192, and the Grand Hotel at Celebration, in Kissimmee. They continue to say in their report that the number of hotels that are expected to go into bankruptcy and ultimately foreclosure is only going to rise."

The Wall Street Journal. "The commercial real-estate sector may never get back to normal, and that could spell trouble for banks. Many banks are concentrated in and dependent on commercial property lending. Banks hold half of all commercial real-estate loans. The 5,000 or so U.S. community banks, with about a third of total assets, are two to three times as concentrated in commercial real-estate lending as the approximately 30 larger banks."

"Problems in commercial real estate can hurt banks in two ways. Losses on existing loans can damage earnings directly, and a correction can reduce future lending volumes, impairing an important driver of earnings. Based on what we know now, things don’t look good."

"A recent Citigroup report on 400 properties in the retail and hotel sectors found an average decline in value of 27%. The stock prices of real-estate investment trusts, companies that own equity in commercial properties, are down 42% for retail properties since the most recent valuation prior to the pandemic onset in March. Office-property REITs are down 36% and lodging property REITs are down 50%."

"For properties financed with typical debt levels of 75% to 80%, even a 30% drop in value—if sustained—is more than enough to push the property underwater."

From Slate Magazine. "For years beginning in the mid-2000s, a roughly four-block plot in downtown D.C. was a concrete wasteland. The resulting $950 million, 10-acre development is CityCenterDC, a shimmering maze of restaurants and stores that opened in 2013. Far from Williams’ inclusive pitch, however, it features luxury ground-floor retail (Gucci, Ferragamo, Hermès) that anchors similarly luxurious office, condominium, and apartment buildings."

"At the end of 2020, though, the CityCenter area is only a little bit busier than it was in its parking lot days. Behind all the floor-to-ceiling glass, pert, well-pressed salespeople tinker with clothes in empty stores, with security guards poised blankly at the gilded doors. The development’s public plaza echoes with the sound of bubbling fountains, but in the absence of passersby the effect is just eerie. At all hours of day, venturing into CityCenter has the distinct feeling of walking through an immaculately maintained theme park after closing time."

"Across the U.S., the coronavirus pandemic has sapped Americans’ appetite for fancy projects like this, in no small part because the cross-section of upwardly mobile people who can afford such apartments—like well-off students, high-earning young professionals, or people with second homes—have fled urban city centers or scaled back on spending."

"'In Manhattan, there is blood on the streets,' one property management executive told BisNow in September about the borough’s luxury rental housing market. Rents there have plummeted 19 percent since this time last year, with the worst loss in demand occurring among luxury housing."

"In Los Angeles, vacancies in luxury apartments are nearing 5 percent. L.A.’s downtown, which saw the largest number of newly built luxury units in the past decade, has been hit particularly hard, with rent prices dropping nearly 8 percent since January of this year, according to L.A. Magazine. Back in D.C., the vacancy rate for luxury housing topped 10 percent this summer. Now the average rent for a luxury apartment in D.C. is $2,387 per month, about $300 less than it was last year."

"Even before COVID-driven job losses forced people to downsize, developers chased luxury housing on a scale no market could match. In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that builders in the U.S. were on track to create more new units of housing in 2020 than in any year since the 1980s. The catch was the 80 percent of those expected 371,000 new rentals are Class A properties geared toward high earners. Given the high cost of land and labor, it’s simply easier to turn a profit building housing for the wealthy, developers said."

"But only delusions of grandeur—of slippery ideas like permanence and 'placemaking,' which is developer lingo for this particular kind of urban revitalization—could encourage the idea that raising entire glossy neighborhoods from scratch would make cities more livable or civically minded. And as it turns out, the things cities chased for so long are part of the reason people are turning away from them."