A report from Bankrate. "The U.S. housing market is on fire. Double-digit appreciation is the rule. Giddy sellers are sifting through multiple offers. Frantic buyers are forced to pay more than asking prices - sometimes by $100,000 or more. The last time the U.S. housing market looked this frothy was back in 2005 to 2007. Then home values crashed, with disastrous consequences. 'The one thing that I keep getting asked over and over is, 'Is this a bubble?' says Phil Shoemaker, president of originations at mortgage lender Home Point Financial. 'If you look at what's going on with home price appreciation, it feels bubble-ish. But if you look at the fundamentals behind it, it's hard to say it is.'"

"'I’m not worried about a housing bubble,' says Ralph McLaughlin, chief economist at financial technology firm Haus.com. 'The fundamentals are all there - low supply combined with growing demand for homeownership - to suggest the overheating we’re seeing in the housing market is not based on animal spirits but on an unfortunate and coincidental series of market forces over the past year.'"

From Fox 2 Detroit in Michigan. "Many homes for sale right now are receiving numerous offers, meaning that buyers have to be aggressive with their offers if they want to have a chance. With home prices up more than 16% in Metro Detroit and inventories low, it's easy to end up paying more than you initially planned, but there are ways to avoid buyer's remorse when making such a large purchase."

"Jeanette Schneider, of Remax of Southeastern Michigan, said that buyers need to consider how much money they are spending when purchasing right now and if they are comfortable with that decision. 'If you have the means and you have the money and this is a long-term place, that may still be OK for you, but for a lot of folks, you really need to sit back and ask yourself, 'Am I OK with overextending myself potentially? Am I OK with making these big financial decisions and not having buyers remorse a couple months down the road?' she said."

From KRON in California. "How far would you go to get the home of your dreams in the Bay Area? A local realtor camped out for days for his clients to make sure they got theirs. He started camping out three days before they went for sale. 'I pulled out my lawn chair. I put it right in front,' said realtor Jeremy Naval. 'It sounds crazy. I feel like this is something you’d probably just see on HGTV or some random story, but it’s true. And at the end of the day, if there’s something that especially my clients want and there’s a certain way I can get it, I will do it but I wouldn’t be surprised if this starts happening more often.'"

"He wasn’t the only one camped out. Dozens of others were also on the sidewalk outside the sales office. There were 18 townhomes up for grabs, starting at $1.2 million. Now what really attracted clients to these condos is that they are set at a fixed rate meaning none of those bidding wars will take place here. 'As soon as you walk in you tell them and then bam the price is right there you write a check for the deposit and you’re all done,' Naval said."

From Capital Radio on California. "Bryant Phuong bought his eight-unit apartment building in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco in 1987, a decade after emigrating to the United States from Vietnam. It was a steady source of income, until the pandemic turned it into a liability. One tenant went five months without paying rent before disappearing, he said. Another hasn’t paid rent in over a year. Owed around $26,000 in arrears, Phuong has had to dip into his savings to cover expenses on the property."

"He’s desperate to get help, but says he has been waiting in the dark after submitting his application over a month ago. That wait has him considering selling the building through which he hoped to retire and build generational wealth for his two kids. 'That was my American dream,' he said. 'Now it looks like we might as well let it go.'"

"In another recent survey of nearly 1,300 landlords in Los Angeles, University of Pennsylvania researchers found that more than a third of landlords with one to five properties couldn’t survive for another three months under current conditions. David Haas, managing broker at Ernst & Haas Management Company in Long Beach, said nearly a fifth of the company’s 1,100 clients have left the rental market over the past year. That’s not so much because of people who fell behind on rent, but because of perceived risk."

"'Houses, condos, the stuff we manage, that stuff is coming off and being sold,' Haas said. 'With all the statutes and regulations, they’re not seeing the risk as worth the higher rents. So what it’s doing is it’s driving rents through the roof.'"

From CBC News in Canada. "Les Otto believes it's hard to get a straight answer from a real estate agent when it comes to the current state of the London region's supercharged housing market. After all, for the most part, he said, they're feeding the frenzy. 'In many respects, they are. All they care about and, I have a lot of friends in real estate and many of them I respect, but they get paid on a commission they make on a house sale, so the more it sells, the more they put in their pocket.'"

"Otto knows this because he's been working in the real estate business in southwestern Ontario for the last 40 years as an appraiser. In order to get a loan from a bank to buy a house or refinance a mortgage, the bank needs an objective assessment of how much that house is worth since that same house becomes the bank's collateral for the loan. That's where Otto comes in."

"So what does a guy with 40 years of experience assessing the value of homes see in today's unprecedented housing prices? Does he see what some believe is simply a bubble that will inevitably burst? 'I don't see it,' he said. 'The demand drives the prices. I've seen houses now that are exceeding a million dollars that a few years ago they were barely pushing $750,000.'"

"Otto said it's why we're seeing bidding wars become the norm. Real estate agents know there are a lot of potential buyers with relatively few homes for sale, so they deliberately price homes under market value to get more realtors to bring their clients in and hopefully, trigger a bidding war. 'In a bidding war all bets are off,' he said. 'The realtor comes and says, 'if you really want this house, you better put $25,000 higher than the list price or $50,000, or some other ridiculous number and people feel compelled to follow the realtor's lead.'"

"Realtors aren't the only people raking in big profits from real estate, Otto said. 'It's huge money for governments.'"

"Otto predicts that as the pandemic runs its course, there could be a softening of the market this winter when fewer people are looking to buy. But he said as long as interest rates and housing inventories remain low, a sudden housing crash is off the table. 'I don't see it,' he said. 'The only thing I see is maybe a periodic softening as it gathers its breath to go on again.'"

The Financial Post in Canada. "The recent surge in home prices has a federal regulator reminding lenders to stay sharp, but it is also prompting concern that borrowers may be stretching themselves financially and, in some cases, stretching the truth when they apply for a mortgage. One Canadian mortgage brokerage told the Financial Post it has recently uncovered a rash of suspicious employment letters submitted by individuals trying to obtain loans in the Greater Toronto Area."

"'I must say this is the most advanced employment fraud I’ve ever come across,' said Dan Eisner, chief executive of True North Mortgage Inc."

"Income letters are provided by prospective borrowers as proof of employment and income, to help show they have the means to pay back a loan. True North, Eisner said, calls the companies on the job letters prior to funding a mortgage (it also has an exclusive lending arm called THINK Financial). For letters that they now suspect are phony, Eisner said that process was followed and someone answered the phone and confirmed the details of the letter. Other documents, such as purported pay stubs, were provided as well."

"However, Eisner said a few weeks back something strange was spotted by a 'closer' at the brokerage, who handles documentation. That employee noticed that two letters provided by two would-be borrowers from two supposedly different people at two supposedly different companies had the exact same signature."

"True North’s closer alerted the underwriting manager, and six or so other suspicious letters were subsequently discovered. In one case, True North pulled its funding at the last second, but heard nothing back from the client, which led Eisner to suspect fraud. 'Because when we pulled the funding on the deal, the client didn’t complain,' he said in an interview. 'And you’ve got to imagine if you’re buying a house, and all of a sudden your bank pulls the funding on the day of closing, you will complain.'"

"True North checked its files to see if there were other deals that fit the profile, and found a handful of other suspicious letters. They were, Eisner said, from companies the lender had never heard of, that all claimed to be located in the Greater Toronto Area, and that they had websites that had been created recently and contained a fair amount of detail. 'They’re not just coming up with websites, they’re coming up with websites that seem fairly deep,' Eisner said."

"A survey by Equifax in February of 1,540 Canadians found that nine per cent hadn’t been totally truthful on a loan application and that that nine per cent said it was acceptable to inflate annual income when applying for a mortgage (which was down from 12 per cent in 2019). Forty per cent of respondents agreed that mortgage fraud is a growing problem."

"One of the trends the credit-reporting agency is seeing recently is a rising level of complexity in manipulating documents, said Carl Davies, head of fraud and identity at Equifax Canada. At the moment, though, demand for residential real estate is up, and policymakers have so far avoided any major moves to try to slow things down. The heightened demand is also increasing the amount of due diligence for lenders, and the rush has yet to die down, potentially putting homeownership further out of reach for some would-be buyers, and particularly younger ones."

"That can provide a strong incentive for someone to inflate their income on their application to obtain the home they want, Equifax’s Davies said. 'While we continue to see a very hot housing market, that kind of first-party fraud, that misrepresentation that we see, I think we’re going to continue to see that coming through pretty strong in Canada,' he added.