A weekend topic starting with the Marina Times in California. "San Francisco’s real estate market may be cooling off a bit. 'Some tech folks have lost up to a third of their stock portfolio’s value this year. Along with other buyers who have down payments invested in stocks, they are certainly more wary than they had been previously,' according to Annie Williams with Sotheby’s International Realty."

"It’s no wonder that people who are not uber wealthy are a bit more wary when buying a home. This can be devastating to sellers of course, who hear it’s a hot market — who expect multiple offers with over-asking bids in no time at all — and find they are unable to sell their homes. It happens, according to Janet Siroto in a realtor.com piece entitled 'The Secret Shame of Owning a Home That Just Won’t Sell.' 'Denial, anger, embarrassment — all these emotions and more fill a home seller’s long days as they wait for their real estate agent to text or call with good news,' Siroto writes."

From Money Wise. "Rick Sharga, an executive with RealtyTrac, says Zillow’s business model was flawed, noting that house-flipping investors often pay too much and underestimate the time and cost to ready a home to sell. 'Zillow Offers appears to have made both mistakes and done so at a large enough scale to result in hundreds of millions of dollars of losses,' Sharga writes."

The Real Deal. "Keller Williams, the Austin-based real estate franchise giant, has implemented yet another round of layoffs in its lending arm, Keller Mortgage. Keller Mortgage scaled up rapidly last year before laying off 150 recent recruits in October, according to Inman. Although the scale of these latest layoffs was still unclear at press time, more than a dozen Keller Mortgage employees posted notices on LinkedIn Tuesday that they’d been laid off, describing the job cuts as 'big,' 'massive' and 'huge.'"

"Several other mortgage lenders — including Better, Pennymac, Guaranteed Rate, Mr. Cooper, and Wells Fargo — have downsized in recent months to adjust to lower refinancing volume, and the nation’s largest mortgage lender, Rocket, expects buyout offers it has made to 2,000 employees will save $180 million a year, according to Inman."

From Tech Crunch. "Reluctantly, we’re writing a tech layoffs roundup for thrid week in a row, because once again, there have been reductions across stages and sectors. Over the past month, public and private tech companies have been announcing mass layoffs across sectors. Employees from Section4, Carvana, DataRobot, Mural, Robinhood, On Deck, Thrasio, MainStreet and Netflix have been impacted by the workforce reductions. Some bigger companies are instituting hiring freezes, such as Twitter and Meta, or announcing a shift in strategy, such as Uber."

The New York Post. "The once-sizzling market for NFTs has become a spectacular bust, as high-profile auctions increasingly flop and investors who plunked down millions for bizarre digital artworks now struggle to unload them at a tiny fraction of what they paid. Last March, Bridge Oracle CEO Sina Estavi bought an NFT of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for $2.9 million, calling it the 'Mona Lisa of the digital world.' Last month, he scrapped an auction to resell it after the highest bid came in below $14,000."

"'This has been fueled by ridiculously inflated cryptocurrency prices and hysterical bidding,' Jeff Bell, CEO of LegalShield, a legal protection firm for consumers, told The Post. 'This is no different than the Gold Rush or the dot-com bubble where people get ahead of themselves — everyone wants to get rich quick.'"

The Washington Post. "With the crypto market cratering by $500 billion in recent weeks, the hype over NFTs has cooled. And while Nate Hart, who is a cryptocurrency investor, is unlikely to sell, he knows that if he puts it on the market today, it would probably sell low. His cat picture isn’t from a sought-after collection, he said, like the colorful apes known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club or the pixelated people known as CryptoPunks."

"'It’s more wait-and-see,' he said. 'If it becomes a historical artifact, then it’s going to be extremely valuable. If that doesn’t happen, then maybe it just fades away into where nobody knows or ever cares about it.'"

From Bloomberg. "Snap Inc. plunged 43%, posting its biggest-ever one-day drop and dragging down social media peers, after the company cut its revenue and profit forecasts, blaming the weaker economic outlook for a sudden slowdown of its advertising business. The companies 'are having to bring these unattainable, unrealistic investors’ expectations back down to Earth,' said Dan Suzuki, deputy chief investment officer at Richard Bernstein Advisors."

From FreightWaves. "Rob Slavin knows his tractor-trailers. He’s a senior pricing analyst at Ritchie Bros. Auctioneer, which sells hundreds of millions of dollars of used transportation equipment each year. And in the two decades he’s been selling or analyzing used truck prices, he’s never seen a market like the one of the past year and a half. Slavin saw big rigs double and sometimes triple in price. A used 2016 truck that would have cost around $32,000 at the end of 2020 would get auctioned off for $75,000, Slavin said. And, at a dealership, where trucks are reconditioned before getting sold, that truck would cost up to $90,000."

"But he knows what goes up must go down. 'I didn’t have any anticipation of it staying where it was,' Slavin told FreightWaves. 'I’m calling what we went through a once-in-a-lifetime experience.'"

From Globes. "Lavish parties were thrown, expensive offices leased and superfluous employees hired as US funds poured cheap money into startups, without due diligence. Now the party is over.Many in Israel's tech sector believe that the shutting down of grocery delivery startup Avo's Israel operations and the complete closure of AI solutions company BeyondMinds, with over 60 layoffs, is the start of a worrying trend. After years of success and prosperity, more and more companies are expected to fail in the coming months."

"Over the past two years, unprecedented amounts of investment have flowed into Israeli startups and now the music seems to be stopping. 'When we raised money last year, our entire due diligence process comprised just two meetings until we received a term sheet. Once such a due diligence process took 6-8 weeks and last year that shrank to five days,' said the CEO of a startup that raised tens of millions of dollars. 'Our investors looked at the presentation - which had data about revenue, growth and a list of customers - and everything was concluded with that. Nobody asked to see an excel sheet with other figures, nobody interviewed our management and nobody tried to talk with the customers.'"

"When Gil Dibner, the founder of the Israeli-European fund Angular Ventures attempts to define recent years in the startup investment market, he uses the term 'collective delusion,' used by the business guru Prof. Scott Galloway. 'In recent years everybody has through big money at problems and opportunities, even when it was clear that throwing the money would not succeed in solving these problems,' he says. 'Now suddenly everybody is waking up to this collective delusion and understanding that beyond the opportunity, it is important that the company also has revenue, and unit economics (profitability for the sale of each product unit) and that it can justify the valuation that it was given.'"

From Daiji World in India. "The joke in the stock markets is tomatoes are more expensive than Zomato. Zomato trades at Rs 62.05 down from a peak of Rs 169.10. Share prices of tech startups such as Zomato, Nykaa and Paytm have caused huge wealth destruction for investors. Ravi Singh, Vice President and head of Research Share India said following the market slump due to the geopolitical crisis and interest rate hikes in developed economies, share prices of tech startups such as Zomato, Paytm and Nykaa have failed, erasing a large part of investors wealth."

The Globe and Mail in Canada. "Trillions of dollars invested in stocks and cryptocurrencies have evaporated since the tech sector selloff began six months ago, and the last thing investors want to do is blame themselves. But if we’re being honest we must admit that we are all partly responsible, because once again our obsession with good stories is a leading culprit. Interest rates alone don’t explain the shift. What we’re seeing now follows a pattern that was also present in each of the ugliest market collapses of the past three decades, including Black Monday, the dot-com crash and the 2008-09 global financial crisis. In each and every one of those market routs, our psychological flaws played a prominent role."

"And now it’s happening again. It’s painful to admit that we could be so silly, because we’ve been burned before – but believing anything else would be an absurd act of self-defence. When cannabis stocks took off five years ago, their investment thesis was eerily similar to the one for pandemic tech stocks. Investors thought they were getting in on the ground floor of the future. No matter how ridiculous the valuations were relative to hard numbers, such as the portion of the population that actually smokes weed or does edibles, investors were told – and happily believed – Canadian cannabis companies were set to take over the world."

"It was the perfect test for behavioural economics. And we failed, spectacularly. Once the hype was exposed, the selloff was unforgiving, and it didn’t stop until there was hardly any value left. Keep that in mind the next time someone tries to argue a company that has never made money is worth tens of billions of dollars."

From The Print. "With its real estate sector slowing down, China is cutting back on costs and issued directives to the administration of its local counties and cities to slash spending, in a bid to avoid an impending economic crisis. Real estate is a key revenue source for China’s local governments, which have grown reliant on sales of land-use rights for state-owned plots, which came to the equivalent of around 50 per cent of total tax revenue in 2021, according to Nikkei Asia."

"With the top leadership doubling down on real estate financing in an attempt to deflate a housing bubble, revenue from such transactions fell drastically for the first four months of this year. Several provincial governments are now resorting to cutting back on expenses as much as possible, according to Nikkei Asia. While some government agencies have stopped all purchases of computers, desks and other supplies, others are no longer distributing notebooks and pencils to civil servants at government and Communist Party meetings."

"Chinese Premier Li Keqiang had painted a grim picture of the job market in the world’s most populous nation due to widespread COVID-19 lockdowns. The No 2 in the hierarchy of China’s ruling Communist Party — called the employment situation 'complex and grave.' His remarks come at a time when the jobless rate in the country has climbed to the highest rate in almost two years, according to data from the government."