A report from The City on New York. "In 2019, Clarence Hamer bought a house and moved to upstate Harriman, turning the two-family home he had owned in Brownsville since 2007 into an investment property. His plan blew up when the tenant who had moved into the unit he formerly occupied stopped paying rent in the summer of 2019. He isn’t paying his mortgage on the Brooklyn building and says he expects to be foreclosed on when his bank eventually moves to collect what it is owed. 'I know I am in jeopardy of losing my home,' said Hamer, 46, 'a home I was going to be turning over to my kids and it doesn’t seem like I am going to do that.'"

The Real Deal. "Another New York City hotel owner is checking out. Billionaire Leonard Stern’s Hartz Mountain Industries wants to hand the keys over to its lenders on its Soho Grand and Roxy Hotels in Lower Manhattan, according to notes on the hotels’ securitized loan. Hartz Mountain 'no longer wants to fund the losses' at the properties, and has requested to transfer the hotels to the special servicer on the $110 million loan via a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure."

"And Hartz Mountain wouldn’t be the first owner to simply throw its hands up and walk away from a struggling property. Earlier this year, the California-based REIT Sunstone Hotel Investors voluntarily surrendered control of the 478-room Hilton Times Square Hotel to special servicer Torchlight Investors. As of the fall, 80 percent of New York City hotels backed by $4 billion in securitized mortgages were showing signs of distress."

The Dallas Morning News in Texas. "A steep decline in permits for Dallas-Fort Worth apartment construction will mean a slowdown in building. Permits for multifamily residential building fell more than 43% last year, according to Richardson-based RealPage. The sharpest drop was in the Fort Worth area, where permits for apartment construction dropped 48.5% in 2020 from 2019."

"'From 2011 to 2019, nearly half of all residential units permitted were multifamily, compared to about 28% prior to the Great Recession and housing bubble,' said RealPage market analyst Chuck Ehmann. 'That ratio was just 24% in December 2020. This cyclical downturn in multifamily permitting will allow the market to adjust from the recent elevated levels that kept D-FW among the national leaders for apartment development in the past few years.'"

"North Texas still tops the country in ongoing apartment development with more than 36,000 units on the way. But the decrease in permits for new projects will reduce construction volumes in the area as properties in the pipeline are completed. D-FW had led the country in apartment permits for several years before 2020′s declines."

The Oregonian. "The number of new building permits filed in Portland last year plunged by 27%, falling even below the trough of the Great Recession. A slowdown was already underway before the coronavirus pandemic hit, following a boom in new hotel and office construction in downtown Portland and new regulations on apartment builders. Then the coronavirus pandemic hit and protests rocked the downtown core, accelerating the falloff."

"Portland’s Bureau of Development Services has notified 13 employees they will lose their jobs March 1 because of declining permitting revenue. A cyclical decline in commercial building permits isn’t a great surprise given the number of new offices and hotels that went up across the city over the last several years, according to Wilkerson. It may take a few years for demand to catch up with the construction boom at the end of the last decade, and the outlook is particularly uncertain as employers evaluate how much remote work will continue after the pandemic."

"As Willamette Week reported last month, Portland plunged from one of the most desirable cities for real estate investors to 66th among 80 cities on an index compiled by the Urban Land Institute. 'The reputational damage is what’s going to exacerbate or prolong what we saw unfold in 2020, effectively,' said Michael Wilkerson, senior economist with the Portland consulting firm ECONorthwest."

The Albuquerque Journal in New Mexico. "Around 42% of all housing units in Taos County are vacant, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, with nearly half of them classified as homes used for seasonal and recreational use. Such a high rate is not uncommon for northern New Mexico, where a lack of jobs and the decimation of such industries as mining have led many people to leave the region; nearby Rio Arriba County has a 37% vacancy rate."

"But what distinguishes Taos County from other areas is the high number of vacation and second homes, as well as its status as a large attraction for tourists. Only 13% of vacant homes in Taos County are available either to rent or buy, according to the Census Bureau. Paloma Villalobos now manages properties for owners of second homes in the Taos area. She said many owners of such properties refuse to rent out their units when they’re away."

"'They don’t want to share or make those properties available for people who live here on an affordable basis,' she said. 'They’re sitting empty.'"

"Carlos Valdez said his home in Valdez, New Mexico, is surrounded by multiple vacant homes. This includes his great-grandmother’s home, which has sat empty for 12 years since the family first sold it. He said he sees the home, which underwent an extensive remodeling, sitting empty every day as he drives to work. 'It’s kind of sad, because a lot of younger people are leaving Taos when they could be here,' he said. 'But there are no jobs here.'"

The Davis Vanguard in California. "A release from the university, citing the fall survey, Julia Ann Easley wrote, 'Apartment vacancies in the city of Davis reached some of their highest rates in more than 40 years as University of California, Davis, students continued with mostly remote studies in the COVID-19 pandemic.' The blended vacancy rate of 12.2 percent—including apartments leased by the unit and by the bed—compares with 1.0 percent in fall 2019. This is the highest such rate since the method was created starting with 2016 survey."

"Among the 1,352 units leased by the bed rather than the unit as a whole, 1,283, or 29.8 percent of the 4,300 beds, were vacant. Last year, 3.4 percent of beds in this type of unit were vacant. In the fall of 2020, the first phase of the Green at West Village opened with more than 1000 beds being added. By next fall, the full project will be online with an additional 2300 beds. In addition, Shasta Hall will add 800 new beds this next fall and, by fall of 2023, the expanded Orchard Park redevelopment project will provide up to 200 two-bedroom units for students."

The Los Angeles Times in California. "This 13,000-square-foot mansion in Beverly Hills has a new owner — one who wasn’t accused of laundering about $250 million from a Malaysian government investment fund and using the stolen cash to produce 'The Wolf of Wall Street.' It’s been a dramatic decade for the property perched in Trousdale Estates, which has been destroyed and rebuilt multiple times with questionable taste and dubious funding."

"In 2007, it was bought by Mohamed Hadid — the celebrity real estate developer known for building a 30,000-square-foot spaceship-like mega-mansion in Bel-Air before a court ordered it to be torn down two years ago. For this one, Hadid erected an Egyptian-themed house complete with a pyramid in the front room and sold it to Jho Low, the Malaysian businessman accused of masterminding a scheme that stole $4.5 billion from the 1Malaysia Development Berhad fund, also known as 1MDB."

"Low, who fled the country and is considered an international fugitive, later transferred it to his partner in the scandal, Riza Aziz. Aziz acquired the property in hopes of rebuilding the gaudy home into a vacation spot for his stepfather. According to the listing, Aziz poured more than $40 million into transforming the extravagant mansion."

"Construction was halted, however, when federal authorities accused Aziz of laundering $250 million from 1MDB, money which allegedly funded the movies he produced and the real estate he purchased. He plead not guilty but agreed to return $107 million in assets, including the Beverly Hills home he was preparing for Razak. As part of the deal, he quietly sold the estate for $19 million in 2019 to a limited liability company based in Delaware whose ownership is not clear. The new developer put the finishing touches on the property, fixing the torn-up landscaping and clearing off dirt and construction equipment that riddled the grounds."

"'There was a cement mixer left in the driveway,' according to one real estate source who was not authorized to comment on the sale. Once completed, the mansion surfaced for sale at $30 million last summer and just sold for $27.4 million. It’s the priciest home sale in Beverly Hills so far this year, according to the Multiple Listing Service."