A weekend topic starting with NPR. "VANEK SMITH: 'Who are these people with this cash?' He says all this started some years back.' A handful of, like, ski bum, techie startuppy types moved into Bozeman from big cities, and they started telling their friends about it. And their friends started getting, like, second homes and ski cabins there, and the town slowly started to change.'"

"SEAN HAWKSFORD: 'It's a lot of people from California. It's caused a lot of kind of anti-California resentment here. You see people who just - for lack of a better way to phrase it, just look like they're from California. You know, like, you don't look like you're from - you know, like…' SMITH: (Laughter) 'What does that mean?'"

"HAWKSFORD: 'There's a certain look about people that are from Montana. Like, I think you tend to look a little bit more practical in the way that you dress rather than fashionable. Yeah, you see somebody who's wearing, like, a big parka with a furry hood on it and is wearing really tight leggings when it's 15 below zero out. And like, I don't know if you've been here for very long.'"

The Shoreline Times in Connecticut. "Rose Ciardiello, a real estate agent, recently listed a Guilford home for $200,000 more than the owners purchased it for just a few years ago. Within hours, offers came in well over the $975,000 asking price, she said. Ciardiello said people moving to the area are driving up the asking price, and often making cash offers. Ciardiello, who primarily sells homes in Madison and Guilford, has called this the 'COVID market."

"Ciardiello said residents of New York City and other major metropolitan areas began to buy up houses in the shoreline area, opting to move to less populated areas that were seeing large day-over-day increases in coronavirus cases. 'Basically, they originally took up all the rentals,' she said. 'Then they started buying the lower-end homes. Then they started buying very expensive homes. We’re still seeing, not only New Yorker, but I’m getting folks from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the West Coast.'"

"Colette Harron, a real estate agent, sells homes through the shoreline area, but especially in Essex, Old Saybrook, Lyme and Old Lyme. 'The prices are up,' she said. 'I don’t know if they’re going to keep on going up, because I can’t predict the future. But definitely prices are up about 20 percent from two years ago. Harron said she knows a driving factor for buyers moving to the area is the pandemic, 'because we’ve been here forever, and (the market) has never been like this. I haven’t seen it like this since 2004, when it was the height of the market.'"

The Charlotte Business Journal in North Carolina. "Could Charlotte's strong seller's market for housing be coming to an end? David Hoffman, a longtime local Realtor, believes the answer to that question is yes — and it could happen sooner than people may think. Hoffman said he is already seeing signs of a looming shift here, one being the turning ratio in coming soon and active listings versus pending sales. A year ago, in a growing area like Ballantyne or Fort Mill, he said there were three pending single-family home sales to one active listing. Fast forward to now, and coming soon and active listings are starting to outpace pending sales at the opposite ratio, he said."

"'My team's seeing it because we'll do a coming soon and, before we go live, three other homes will have hit the market,' said Hoffman, CEO of Charlotte-based David Hoffman Realty, which has 40 agents. 'In three weeks, we'll go from zero houses to three houses. We’re seeing like one (new listing) a week, while last year there wasn’t one a month.'"

"He's also noticing that buyers are beginning to become more selective, which he expects to continue due to the high prices and more homes hitting the market this year. That's leading to some price reductions. 'We're still selling above market when the home shows like a model,' he said. 'But when the home has any major flaws, you're starting to see that buyers are pickier than people are realizing.'"

The New York Post. "It only took eight years. A British financier has snapped up billionaire Vincent Viola’s Upper East Side townhouse at 12. E. 69th St. for the slashed price of $59 million, according to property records and sources. That may sound like a lot of dough, but the Versailles-style home, built in 1883, first hit the market for $114 million in 2013. At the time it was the city’s most expensive home on the market."

The International Press Agency. "Affordable housing is scarce, while at the same time many apartments remain empty. This is a problem that many cities are struggling with. The government of the Balearic islands in Spain has now found a solution. A total of 56 apartments, most of them on Mallorca, will be turned into social housing for seven years. Residents are expected to pay only 30 percent of their income as rent, and the owners will be compensated for this."

"Vacant apartments and houses are a worldwide issue. In Europe, 11 million housing units are empty, with Spain being the leading country with 3.4 million vacant housing units. At the same time, over 4 million people have no roof over their heads in Europe. This means there are almost three times as many vacant apartments as there are homeless people."

"A lot of the empty apartments and houses are located in tourist areas like the Balearic islands and were built during the real estate boom until the housing crisis in 2008. A lot of the properties have never been lived in. According to The Guardian, many apartments were bought as an investment and without the intention of ever living in them."

The South China Morning Post. "Like countless parents throughout China, those of 34-year-old Yuan Yin want to do everything they can to support him and his future wife as they prepare to get married. But the weakened property market in Sheyang county, Jiangsu province, is making it difficult to pull together a wedding dowry – marriage expenses traditionally offered by the groom’s family in the country."

"Yuan is a migrant worker, living and working in Guangzhou – nearly 1,700km (1,056 miles) away from his parents. They had hoped to provide him and his fiancée with about 800,000 yuan (US$123,000) by selling a small shop the parents own on a main commercial street, but the shop’s value has plummeted amid the coronavirus-fuelled recession, and not a single buyer has inquired about the property since they listed it months ago."

"'Local home prices [in Sheyang county] have dropped from 10,000 yuan [per square metre] in 2019 to just about 7,000 yuan now,' Yuan said. 'Whether I can start a business, get married, or even have a child is based on the value of our family home. I bet all ordinary Chinese families think the same.'"

"'I feel so stressful when seeing how property prices are falling,' said Li Feng, who has to pay mortgages on two flats in downtown Tianjin, where prices have dropped to less than 40,000 yuan per square metre from 50,000 yuan in 2017 when he made the purchases. As of October, Tianjin property prices had fallen by as much as 21.8 per cent from their peak in March 2017, the National Business Daily report said."

"'I already feel that stagflation has arrived because our income has stagnated in the past two years, but prices of necessities have all soared,' Li said. 'I thought that Tianjin’s housing prices would pick up, since the authorities were easing interest rates during the Covid outbreak, but strangely that did not happen.'"

From CTV News in Canada. "Earlier this month, a Senneville home that was built in 1865 sold for $8 million, making it the most expensive house sold on the Island of Montreal so far this year. According to the real estate who sold the property, the new owner has a lot of work to do. 'There are millions of dollars that need to be put into this property to upgrade it, on the outside (and) on the inside,' said Joseph Montanaro."

"All over the island and beyond, realtors are seeing a phenomena that was almost unheard of five years ago. Homes are regularly selling for well above the asking price. In Ste-Adele, realtor Michel Desjardins said he’s never seen so many offers coming in significantly above the asking price. 'We list a house on Saturday and it's sold on Sunday. We never saw that in the Laurentians for many, many years,' he said."

"Many realtors have dubbed it 'the COVID market.' According to the Quebec Professional Association of Real Estate Brokers, the prices of single family homes are rising dramatically all over the province. On the Island of Montreal, they were up 19% last year; in Laval, 20%; and on the north shore 27%."

"One economist recently made headlines when he told BNN-Bloomberg the Canadian housing market may be one of the biggest bubbles ever. 'We have a situation where home prices are up 18 percent, year over year, with practically no wage growth,' said David Rosenberg, the chief economist of Rosenberg Research."

"Real estate agents are split on where the market is going. 'I'm telling everybody, the price that we're asking is a COVID price and in two, three, four years, it won't (be) worth probably that much money,' said Desjardins. But Hampstead realtor Rebecca Sohmer sees it differently. 'I don't see an end to it, I really don't,' she said. 'There are too many buyers for the properties for me to believe it's going to end anytime soon.'"

The Globe and Mail in Canada. "Flipping through The Globe and Mail’s real estate section these days is a boggling experience. This Friday’s showed clear signs of madness at both the high and low ends of this season’s red-hot market. A four-bedroom mansion in Oakville, just west of Toronto, recently sold for $18-million. A three-bedroom townhouse, also in Oakville, sold for $1,050,000, $250,000 'over asking.' A little Toronto bungalow that went for $550,000 as recently as 2011 is on the market for $1,125,000."

"Every sign points to the kind of frenzy that periodically overtakes Canadian housing. The average price for a Greater Toronto home passed the $1-million threshold for the first time in February. The selling price of a detached house jumped 23 per cent compared with a year earlier, reaching $1,371,791. Nationally, the average home price in February was a record $678,091, up 25 per cent."

"The mindset that takes hold at times like this is familiar. Seeing prices soaring, buyers rush to get into the market before they miss the boat. Speculators jump in after them, hoping to flip properties and make a few hundred thousand bucks overnight. All this demand pushes prices up even further, which causes more panic buying at stupid prices."

"The fever rages until something happens to put the fear in buyers. Prices plunge and the opposite mindset sets in: The sky is falling, time to sell, sell, sell. It happens, to various degrees, for every kind of asset, from oil to gold to stocks. Somehow we have managed to convince ourselves that Canadian homes are different. Their prices have risen for so long that it seems they must keep on rising without end."

"Real estate boosters will tell you that houses are different from other things we invest in. People live in them, you know! You can’t live in your art collection. They will tell you that Canadian homes, in particular, are capable of defying the laws of gravity. The streams of newcomers flooding into the country mean that demand for housing is sure to remain strong, and high demand means high prices."

"But, in the end, houses and apartments are just a commodity like anything else, subject to the same peaks and valleys in price that come to them all. What goes up must eventually come down. To believe otherwise is to succumb to the very human tendency to think that things will keep on going as they happen to be going at present. They don’t."

"Both the United States and Britain suffered a collapse in home prices at the end of the 2000s. Toronto’s market crashed at the end of the 1980s (about five minutes after I bought my house there, as it turned out). Don’t ever think 'it can’t happen here.' It has and it will."