It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Sidney Kimmel just sold his lavish Manhattan condo for about $20 million. Kimmel was original asking $39.5 million for the home in December 2018. Kimmel and his wife bought the apartment in 2001 for $22.3 million, and commissioned architect Thierry Despont to redesign the space."

"Someone took a big bite out of the Big Apple. Commercial real estate prices in New York’s Manhattan suffered the steepest decline of any city in the country, according to the Real Deal. 'Nobody wants to take a loss on what is expected to be a temporary dislocation to income from the Covid-19 economic disruptions,' RCA senior vice president Jim Costello is quoted in the Real Deal. 'Borrowers and lenders will continue to paper over problems in line with this optimism. Still, even with anticipation of a temporary dislocation, some investors and lenders will not be able to hold on even with the finish line for the pandemic in sight.'"

"A ranking for national real estate investors’ interest in developing in Portland has seen a dramatic downturn in recent years, and plummeting particularly in the last year. 'Before the pandemic, we had too many office buildings and too many apartments in the central city already,' said Chris Nelson a volunteer District Council Chair in Portland for ULI. 'It got too popular in some ways and I think got somewhat overbuilt before the pandemic hit. So now you have the confluence of a more challenging economic environment for real estate investment, and then boom, the pandemic hits, and it makes it even more difficult.'"

"Denver-based private investment firm Platform Capital has filed a $37M foreclosure lawsuit against the owner of a historic downtown Miami building that houses a WeWork office. The South Florida Business Journal reported that the mortgage on the Security Building was issued for $38M in 2016. The complaint alleges that Security Building AR Owner missed loan payments starting in April 2020 and failed to deposit revenue into a clearing account and give the lender up to $500K from any potential sale of the building as agreed. A potential buyer had paid a $5M deposit in 2019. Though that deal was terminated, the lender claims it is owed $500K from the deposit."

"According to Apartmentguide, rent prices for some of Denver’s most expensive neighborhoods are decreasing. 'In one neighborhood on the list of the 10 most expensive places to live, prices have dropped significantly, about 20%, over the past year,' said Brian Carberry, senior managing editor for Apartmentguide. That neighborhood is City Park West."

"The Hat Mansion is turning into a Rorschach test for Manteca. The Mansion so-named as it was the dream creation of grape broker Michael Hat is a community issue today because Richland Communities wants to develop the 184-acre vineyard 'estate' into housing. But the real question may be what happens if someone buys the mansion, the homes are all built, Richland walks away, and then whoever owns it goes belly up and the mansion goes into foreclosure."

"Recall the viscous howling by those owning nearby 2,800-square-foot homes on 7,000 plus square foot lots when Richland proposed placing more affordable housing next door that was half the size of theirs on lots that were half the size as well. The bottom line is 1313 Overbuilt Way in a Manteca subdivision tract is not where people that can handle mortgage payments 10 times the size of a typical McMansion will consider when they are looking for a home."

"So what happens if the mansion five years after everything is built goes into foreclosure? If you recall the salad days of the mortgage crisis/Great Recession foreclosed houses in Manteca became party houses for teens, flophouses for druggies, havens for the homeless, and were trashed to the point they looked like inner city drug houses. For those who live in nearby neighborhood and are pulling to keep the mansion in place, remember those squatters will have to pass through your neighborhoods to get there."

"The number of condominiums put up for rent in Toronto more than doubled in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier, a sign of a growing exodus of people from the city’s downtown. The 132 per cent surge in supply sent rents tumbling in Canada’s financial capital, one of the country’s priciest cities for housing. The average rent for a one-bedroom condo fell almost 17 per cent from a year earlier to $1,845 (US$1,453), while costs for a two-bedroom unit dropped about 15 per cent to $2,453, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board."

"'Growth in the number of available units far outstripped growth in rental transactions,' said Lisa Patel, president of the TRREB. 'The result was much more choice and negotiating power for renters and a downward adjustment in average rents.'"

"The traditionally buoyant London rental market has taken a hit — with the damage most readily apparent at the top. And the consequences for the city’s renters, landlords and home owners will be felt for quite some time yet. One key factor behind the ailing rental market is the exodus of people leaving London, equivalent to around one in 12 leaving the city."

"So landlords aren’t faring well. Skinny rental yields, across price points, have long been a feature in London — they’re lower here than in any other part of the country. Rental properties have often been held as more of a trophy asset, with owners comforted by the perception of liquidity and endless international demand pushing up the value of the real-estate. Now this illusion is faltering."

"The short-term rental market in Dublin’s docklands has 'collapsed,' with couples shunning one-bed apartments with too little space to work remotely, according to a report. Rents have fallen on average 13 per cent in the docklands since March, and by even more at the upper end of the market. While the demand for short-term rentals fell, the report noted that the supply of long-term rental units more than doubled. 'This, combined with reduced demand due to lockdown measures and work from home initiatives, caused rents to fall steeply in the second and third quarters,' it said."

"Housing loans in Dubai surged in 2020 compared to a year earlier, as buyers took advantage of falling real-estate prices and lower upfront costs, according to an industry source. 'People who had no problems with salary were finding themselves in a position to buy, and with property prices being as low as they were in 2008, they were making the first step onto the property ladder,' wrote Stuart Roe, the head of mortgages at real-estate firm Allsopp & Allsopp."

"The number of high-end apartments remaining unsold in HCMC soared by 74 percent year-on-year in the last quarter of 2020 as demand slumped. Only 5,007 were sold in the quarter, according to CBRE. Nearly 6,700 units at six projects had entered the market in the period. Overall new apartment supply topped 17,200 units. The high-end segment, with prices of $2,000-4,000 per square meter, accounted for 76 percent of the country's total apartment supply."

"According to the Ho Chi Minh City Real Estate Association (HoREA), the oversupply of high-end apartments is causing concern by making the real estate market unsustainable. Over 60 percent of high-end apartments are bought by speculators, which is threatening the sustainable development of the housing market, HoREA said."

"Just about every review of growth in China — of steel prices or of iron ore demand — contains reference to China’s property market. Few countries in the world have a property sector that plays such a large and dynamic role in the country’s GDP. Furthermore, few have one that causes such concern among a minority of economists that obsess over the risks the sector poses. So, a detailed analysis in The Economist is a welcome insight into the scale and scope of the market that underlines why it is such a significant driver of not just GDP but raw material prices and seaborne trade."

"To cite The Economist, every year China starts building about 15 million new homes. That’s more than quintuple the number in America and Europe combined. Chinese real-estate developers are on the hook for more than $100 billion in bond repayments during 2021 alone, according to Moody’s. For the world as a whole, roughly one-tenth of outstanding bank loans to non-financial clients has gone to China’s property sector, whether as financing for developers or mortgages for homebuyers."

"Yet away from the prime spots there is plenty of housing, fully one fifth of which is vacant, The Economist reports."