A report from the New York Post. "The best deals are to be found in Northwest Queens, where rent prices are down 17%, matching discounts in Manhattan — but in Queens, apartments were cheaper to begin with. Landlords are offering the equivalent of 3.4 months free rent, up 88.9% compared to last year and far more than what is being offered in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Experts say the reason for the steep decline is because there are so many new apartments that were recently built in Queens, and now there are not enough residents to fill them."

"'If they haven’t hit bottom, not that far away from it. There’s only so far rents can go before you’re just losing money on the property,' said said Victor Rodriguez, director of market analytics at the CoStar Group."

The Los Angeles Times in California. "Since March the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco has dropped nearly 30%, the largest decrease in the country. For some renters — mostly middle- and upper-income earners — it’s now more affordable to live in the famously expensive city than in its bluer-collar neighbor, Oakland. A year ago, only about 1% of the units managed by members of the San Francisco Apartment Assn., the city's largest landlord group, were vacant, said Janan New, its executive director. Now, she said, nearly a quarter are empty."

"Data from the U.S. Postal Service show that 56,000 more people requested address changes out of San Francisco in 2020 than those moving in. 'Every man, woman and their dog is saying there’s no point living in downtown San Francisco if you’re not going into work,' said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University."

From 9 News on Colorado. "Some landlords told 9Wants to Know they are feeling the financial squeeze amid the pandemic as tenants use the eviction moratorium to stay in their home. Terri Sullivan said her tenants are using the CDC eviction moratorium to stay in their home and haven’t paid rent since September 2020. 'We had to get rid of a car. We have had to cut back pretty much everywhere,' said Terri Sullivan, who rents a townhouse in Colorado Springs. 'We had to take some money out of retirement funds to be able to make the mortgages so we could scrape by.'"

From Vancouver is Awesome in Canada. "A Port Coquitlam mother stuck with over $14,000 in mortgage and utility bills after a tenant reportedly skipped out on five months of rent says she's been left frustrated by an overburdened legal system backed up by the COVID-19 pandemic. Suzanna de Souza says her troubles started with the tenant back in 2016 while she was in the midst of a divorce and short on money. When a couple from Ottawa offered to pay up to a year’s rent in advance if she didn’t seek references or do a credit check, de Souza says she was suspicious but ultimately desperate enough that she went ahead."

"'I was going through a divorce, couldn’t afford my mortgage on the house and then here comes a sweet deal,' she recalls. 'I was like, ‘Oh wow. All this money.’ But the lump sum payment never came."

"When de Souza said she went to serve court documents to her ex-tenants at their new house on the top of Burke Mountain in Coquitlam, she found them living in a six-bedroom house on a corner lot. 'They drive brand new BMWs. I drive a beat-up Prius,' she says."

From Bisnow UK. "Beware of a mental trick, one humans often play on themselves. Placing the economic pain in 2020 makes it possible to tell ourselves that 2021 will be the year of recovery. The more pain we locate in the past, the more justifiable it becomes to believe that 2021 will be the year in which everyone, including the property industry, builds back better."

"Red Flag Alert has been measuring corporate financial performance and business distress since 2004. Its 2020 data makes for surprising reading. The surprising fact about the Red Flag data is not how much damage has been done, but how little. The worst could be yet to come, as government support recedes."

"'Changes in insolvent debt last year were significantly suppressed by the Government’s COVID-19 support measures. On first glance, this can seem like a huge positive, but it’s actually masking a very serious problem,' Red Flag Alert Managing Director Mark Halstead said. 'The Government is propping-up tens of thousands of ‘zombie companies’, which should actually be allowed to fail. Pumping taxpayers’ money into these struggling businesses is a lost cause and when Government coronavirus support ends, it will drive a sudden spike in companies going out of business, with them leaving behind billions of pounds in outstanding invoices that will never be paid.'"

"Halstead is far too polite to say that too many real estate businesses are living in a fool’s paradise, but it is probably true nonetheless. Human beings love stories with happy endings, and it would be so human and so tempting to declare that the coronavirus story arc ends here, sometime in 2021. But these sideways glimpses of some unusual data sets suggest the drama may only just have begun."

From Commercial Real Estate on Australia. "Retail shops could soon go the way of empty city office towers, with small businesses facing a 'year of reckoning' as government stimulus measures are wound back. It could trigger a wave of distressed selling in the commercial property market, sending values plunging, according to the director of an accountancy firm in Sydney."

"'We are already in a recession – it just has a big dirty Band-Aid on it,' said Leah Oliver of Minnik Chartered Accountants, a firm specialising in small family-run businesses."

"The end of support packages – such as JobKeeper, loan relief and mortgage deferrals – will increase the number of properties added to the market later this year, Ms Oliver predicted, as mortgagees worry about possible foreclosures. 'What we expect to see is distressed sellers, and distressed selling of property is what disrupts the market,' she said. 'We haven’t seen any of that yet because stimulus measures have meant people haven’t felt the pressure to liquidate [their] assets.'"

"Office occupancy rates remain at record lows in CBDs, with figures revealing an estimated two-thirds of Melbourne offices were empty in January, while Sydney offices were less than half full. Her sobering predictions about office and retail commercial real estate have also become personal. Ms Oliver recently listed for sale the office the firm had occupied for three years – and where she’d undertaken a major renovation – because her staff are all working from home. 'To have an asset sitting there that was empty, it was a no brainer,' she said."

"She said the writing was on the wall when it came to a looming downturn in the commercial property market, but its severity and duration remained a mystery. 'At the end of the day, it’s pure economics. It’s a recession,' she said. 'But we will pass through it and come out the other end.'"