A report from Moneywise. "The golden days of real estate investors buying and flipping homes for a quick profit appear to have come to a halt. Investors lost money on roughly one of every seven (13.5%) homes they sold in March, according to Redfin. That followed a dire month in February, when real estate investors lost money on 14.5% of homes sold — the highest rate since 2016 and a long stretch from the record monthly low of 2.8% in May 2022. Real estate investors are most likely to lose money in markets that saw the largest surges in house prices during the pandemic, according to Redfin. In March, the hardest hit market was Phoenix, Arizona, where 30.7% of homes sold by investors lost money. Phoenix was followed by Las Vegas, Nevada, (28%), Jacksonville, Florida, (20.9%), Sacramento, California, (20.2%) and Charlotte, N.C. (17.4%)."

"'I recently showed one of my buyers a three-bedroom single-family home in Glendale that was listed by an investor,' Phoenix Redfin agent Van Welborn said. 'My client ultimately found another house they liked better, and the investor ended up losing about $20,000. The investor bought the home for $450,000 and sold it for $480,000, but put $50,000 of work into it. The house also sold below the $550,000 list price after sitting on the market for almost four months.'"

"'You might wonder why investors don’t just wait to sell until the housing market bounces back,' Redfin’s senior economist Sheharyar Bokhari said. 'Many long-term investors who rent their properties out are doing that, but many flippers — especially those who bought recently — can’t afford to.'  Home flippers — which Redfin defines as investors that buy and resell homes within nine months — sold roughly one in five homes at a loss in March, according to Redfin. 'Holding onto homes that aren’t producing income can be expensive because the owner is on the hook for property taxes, along with operating costs and monthly mortgage payments in some cases,' Bokhari added. 'Many short-term investors are also opting to sell because they know prices may have more room to fall and want to cut their losses.'"

WRAL News in North Carolina. "Prices are coming down in the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. A year ago, buyers were competing for homes with offers tens of thousands of dollars – even six figures – over the asking price. Tanisha Hithe, who is trying to sell her home and is making repairs and renovations after failing to sell last year, told WRAL News: 'What we’re trying to do here is sell our home, right! Just making it something that will grab someone’s attention to say – oh I really want to be in this home. I can see myself raising a family here. To say stressful is an understatement.'"

The New York Post. "From impossible-to-score tickets for Taylor Swift’s New York City concert and a $6,000 Vespa — to pricey gym memberships and cars — high-gloss gifts to facilitate home sales are at an all-time high. These catchy incentives are in response to a slowing real estate market, industry experts say. 'As a general rule, the more the market drops, the greater the perks that buyers and agents can expect,' said Taylor Marr, the lead economist for Redfin. 'These are on top of sellers dropping their asking prices too.'"

"According to a recent Redfin analysis, around 46% of sellers around the US offered gifts with a sale, a record high for the last decade. In New York, where real estate sales are down 38% year-over-year and prices are down by 3%, one in every six sellers dangled a gift to woo a new owner — and an expensive one, at that. Marr says that the value of the average gift is between $5,000 and $10,000, with some as high as $80,000. 'We’re seeing an unprecedented number of these incentives out there,' he said."

The Times of San Diego in California. "After two months of rising home sales in San Diego County, the market fell by double digits in April, the Greater San Diego Association of Realtors reported. 'Homes are selling at a much slower pace than a year ago, with escrows closing in the 30-day range,' the association said in a report this week. Sales of single-family homes dropped 13%, while condominium sales were off 11%. Both were down by over a third from April 2022. Though sales volume declined, the median price of a single-family home ticked up 1% in April to $952,600, but remains nearly 5% under a year ago. The median price for a condominium was $640,000, 3% lower than a year ago."

Bisnow San Francisco in California. "Two new listings for office properties in downtown San Francisco shine new light on how much valuations have fallen in the once high-flying market. A 138K SF building at 123 Townsend St. is on the market, according to Real Estate Alert, a division of Green Street News, and is expected to sell for about $90M, far off the $140M CBRE Investment Management paid for it in July 2020. Similarly, Real Estate Alert pointed to the listing of a 157K SF building at 60 Spear St. The anticipated list price of $55M is half what New York-based Clarion Property Partners paid for it in the summer of 2022. 'The offerings come as early results from a wave of distressed listings suggest that pricing dislocation in the city may be worse than initially feared,' Real Estate Alert said in the report."

The News Tribune in Washington. "The bad news is accumulating when it comes to apartment development in the Tacoma area. The latest came with a Friday report released by real estate entity Kidder Mathews on Seattle and Puget Sound’s apartment markets. Seattle took perhaps the biggest hits in the report. 'To say that the bloom is off the ‘tech rose’ is a massive understatement,' said Dylan Simon in a release accompanying the report. 'Seattle is on track for the fewest annual apartment sales in over a decade, with only 13 recorded sales in Q1 2023,' according to the report. 'Buyers cite interest rates and weak renter demand, while sellers continue to hold tight to yesteryear’s values.'"

"Meanwhile, a July 21 foreclosure auction looms for Tacoma Trax and the developers’ completed Madison Plaza project in Kent after multiple lien filings and two separate cases filed in King County Superior Court seeking to recoup money owed on loans and construction equipment rental. And this week, Tacoma-based Harbor Custom Development, which has pivoted more to multifamily-unit development in different U.S. markets in the past few years, announced its founder and CEO was stepping down in mid-July along with other executive moves. That news came after lower-than-expected earnings were reported for the quarter and for 2022 by the company at the end of March. Of the company’s six Puget Sound area apartment properties put on the market in April 2022, only two have attracted buyers so far."

The Globe and Mail. "A year into the fastest campaign to hike interest rates in decades, the commercial real estate sector is deadlocked. In one corner, the world’s most sophisticated private real estate investors, including Canadian pension plans, say scores of properties they own are worth hundreds of millions of dollars each and have held most of their value. In the other, investors are dumping shares of publicly-traded real estate investment trusts (REITs), particularly those that own skyscrapers, because they don’t think such lofty values still make sense. In Canada, the national vacancy rate of office towers just hit an all-time high, and in New York, there are enough empty offices to fill 26 Empire State Buildings."

"Amid this chaos, private owners do occasionally acknowledge the winds have shifted. Last year Royal Bank Plaza, the tower that houses the headquarters of Canada’s largest lender, Royal Bank of Canada, sold for $1.1-billion. Its sellers were OMERS’ real estate arm, Oxford Properties, and its co-investor, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.At OMERS’ annual meeting in April, Blake Hutcheson, OMERS’ CEO, told pension plan members that if they tried the same sale again now, 'I would think we’d get $300-million or $400-million less.' That’s a 30- to 40-per-cent drop, in line with public market valuations."

"'The fundamentals are brutal. Some of these buildings are never coming back,' said Jeff Olin, the co-founder of Vision Capital Corp. He still thinks some office towers are great, but when it comes to private owners’ estimates, 'there’s certainly denial, that’s for sure.'"

The Daily Mail. "Barefoot Investor Scott Pape has warned Aussies to think twice before buying a house with just a two per cent deposit. He revealed a letter from a woman who managed to buy a unit as a single mum on a low income who is also a carer and sending money to a parent living overseas. Jane said she had put down a two per cent deposit when interest rates were low with help from the then-Coalition government's First Home Loan Deposit Scheme. But now her fixed rate is about to run out, her mortgage is about to triple, she's 'terrified' and wants advice on switching banks to keep her costs down."

"Mr Pape was blunt in his answer, saying 'Jane has about as much chance of moving banks as Peter Dutton has of being Prime Minister'. 'She pretty much had zero equity in the joint to begin with, and it went down from there,' he said. 'So not only is she deeply in the red but, more importantly, her interest rate is about to triple, and her repayments could take food off her table.' Jane had admitted in her email to him that she had gone 'against what you recommended' because 'the government said they were helping me buy a unit'."