It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "'Twelve years ago, [the housing boom] led to a bad outcome with a foreclosure crisis. But that was due to funny mortgages that went to everyone without income documentation,' said Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors. 'This time around, all the mortgages are soundly underwritten.'"

"'The builders are out there building like crazy, but of course, land is expensive, so new construction tends to be a little bit higher than existing,' said Susan Semba, Idaho Housing and Finance Association's executive vice president of homeownership lending. IHFA also has affordable programs that offer homebuyers up to 6.5% on down payment and closing cost assistance. 'That will definitely get you into a loan with hardly any money out of your pocket,' Semba said."

"Former high-flying billionaire hedge-fund manager Phil Falcone appears to be close to losing his townhouse on East 67th Street as well as his Hamptons estate. Now he owes $1.8 million in back taxes to New York City, according to public records. And last September he whined that he was too cash-poor to pay a nearly $14 million legal tab, according to a lawsuit filed against him in Manhattan Supreme Court that is still winding its way through the court."

"When Jesús Flores first heard about the drama with SiliconSage — the upstart developer being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly defrauding investors — he said he felt dismayed. They wonder if the land will sit idle, attracting blight and exacerbating the area's problems. Many reports allege the company paid investors' returns using money from new investments, mirroring the structure of a Ponzi or pyramid scheme."

"The coronavirus outbreak helped push about $146 billion of commercial real estate into distress, serious risk of bankruptcy or default at the end of last year. Many properties never make it to Chapter 11, with real estate changing hands through foreclosures, deeds-in-lieu and loan sales. 'Jingle mail' is industry parlance for the common practice of a distressed property owner or sponsor voluntarily handing over the keys to its lender once they’re unable to make payments."

"Scott MacPherson, Vancouver-based managing director of Cushman & Wakefield’s Equity, Debt and Structured Finance Group, said peak prices for land entitled for condominium development in Vancouver have fallen off from more than $500 per square foot to the mid-$300s. 'With revenue dropping off for absorption, and hard costs essentially staying at par with where they were in 2019, it’s difficult to make up that difference. The residual value of the land has to shift. That’s the only way the economics work.'"

"The share of new homes in England and Wales sold off-plan has been steadily falling since its peak in 2016. In 2020, the proportion of off-plan sales reached the lowest share since 2014. Edward Heaton, managing partner of national buying agents, Heaton & Partners, said: 'For many, especially international buyers, buying off-plan was seen as a sure-fire way to turn a profit before they had even taken possession of their properties.'"

"'The thinking was that in the one to two years from locking in their purchase price, house price inflation would turn a tidy profit before they'd even needed to make their final payment. The gravy train is well and truly over - buyers now are much more likely to be end users who prefer to have something tangible to see and touch before parting with their hard earned cash.'"

"Tighter mortgage lending rules put in place before the pandemic hit prevented house prices surging and avoided a market crash, the Central Bank has claimed. Meanwhile, there will be 15,000 mortgage-holders in ‘serious trouble’ as a direct result of the pandemic, the chief of the Irish Mortgage Holders Organisation has said. CEO David Hall added: ‘I nervously laugh when I hear people talk about a current housing crisis and homeless crisis – no one has a clue what is coming. I have always said there is a tsunami of repossessions coming. It is grim. It is not going to be pretty.’"

"In the construction industry, insolvencies are a dime a dozen. But it’s not often you see a wealthy builder turfed out of their luxury penthouse as a result. Alas for Grocon scion Daniel Grollo, the Grocon-constructed Eureka Tower pad he’s been calling home for several years is ultimately owned by a company among the nearly 100 entities now in the hands of administrators. And they’ve bowed to the demands of creditors, a spokesman confirming they intended to sell the expansive 80th-floor apartment."

"Grollo, who blames the growing collapse of his family’s building empire on a $270 million dispute with Infrastructure NSW, is also out of a job, having been one of around 20 staff at Grocon terminated by the administrators this month. Aside from any termination benefits, he’s owed more than $1 million in leave entitlements alone, but has previously indicated that as a director, he would have his claims met from the unsecured creditor pool. Which is unlikely to stretch very far at all."