A report from the Ahwatukee Foothills News in Arizona. "'We’re in a unique situation in Maricopa County. Nearly 200 people daily are moving into Greater Phoenix, and the inventory is still limited while demand is strong,' said Butch Leiber, president of the Phoenix realtors board of directors. 'Year-over-year housing numbers look weak, especially given the drastic shift from May to December 2022, but the trend behind the numbers is shifting upward.' The average sales price dropped 6.1% to $588,444 from 12 months earlier."

"'Homes are selling for less than asking price – a change from a year ago,' said Leiber. 'The trends of the last three months show that perhaps the worst is behind us and that the market is coming closer to where it should realistically be. The last few years, Phoenix enjoyed an extraordinary run, but now we see the market normalizing. I believe we’ve seen the worst of it as we head out of the eye of the storm.'"

The Philadelphia Inquirer in Pennsylvania. "Bill Glazer, owner of Keystone Development + Investment, is one of the Philadelphia area’s busiest redevelopers. He took questions from The Inquirer on how builders are dealing with higher interest rates and bank troubles. How’s business? Every asset class is facing pressures. We are seeing universally that capital availability is being pulled back for every class.You know that Toll Bros. was unable to pull off their condominium project. They demolished [part of Jewelers Row in Philadelphia], but they did not build. They sold the ground to Pearl Properties. You read that the big Durst project on the waterfront stalled. Most new, ground-up projects are being shelved or paused or sidelined. The contractors are still finishing up jobs in their pipeline. But it’s coming."

The Real Deal on Texas. "As the spring buying season crept up in the Lone Star State, April flowers failed to bloom in Houston. Inventory is overflowing in the Bayou City’s real estate market; meanwhile, prices remain relatively high, according to the Houston Association of Realtors. While new listings were down more than 8 percent in April, year-over-year, the city’s available properties shot up nearly 63 percent. When homes come onto the market in Houston, they are increasingly staying there. Median days on market have increased 67 percent from 20 days to 33 year-over-year, according to Redfin."

"Would-be homebuyers are pulling back, reports from HAR suggest. Sales volume in the Bayou City has been on a steady decline since last summer, prior to the winter seasonal decline. 'I think rising interest rates are going to be a continual concern for buyers moving in, even into the summer months, but I think we’re going to have a strong summer,' said Cathy Trevino, HAR chair. 'It’s kind of hard to tell. I wish we had a crystal ball. We’ve heard from many economists that toward the end of the year interest rates may go down. So, we do have a lot of buyers that are on the fence, who are then turning more towards rental, which is definitely peaking as well.'"

From Fortune. "According to John Burns Research and Consulting, institutional investors—those owning over 1,000 homes—bought 90% fewer homes in January and February than they did the first two months of 2022. Look no further than Invitation Homes, the largest owner of U.S. single-family rental homes, which recently became a net seller. In the first quarter of 2023, Invitation Homes bought 194 homes, while it sold off 297. That's a jarring shift. 'We’re pretty much on pause across all [homebuying] strategies,' Tejas Joshi, director of single-family residential at Yieldstreet, which owns over 700 single-family homes, recently told Fortune. 'I don’t think [house] prices have bottomed yet … On average, we have another 5% decline nationally, and it’ll vary by market. Peak-to-trough, 12% to 15% [national] decline.'"

"High interest rates, coupled with frothy home prices, mean that buying new single-family rentals doesn’t make a lot of sense right now for some institutional investors. Joshi says Yieldstreet is waiting for either house prices to take another leg down or interest rates to come back down. Or both. 'If short-term [interest] rates came down around 4%, and if home prices were about 15% lower than the peak last year, that is a valuation that supports the equity return that investors need to make,' Joshi tells Fortune."

The Los Angeles Times in California. "In the days before Los Angeles' 'mansion tax' took effect, the luxury market moved at hyperspeed. Prices were slashed, escrows were rushed and million-dollar deals were closed as panicked sellers offered exotic cars and lucrative bonuses to anyone willing to buy their properties by the end of March. It was a manic, desperate attempt at avoiding Measure ULA, a new transfer tax that levies a 4% charge on all residential and commercial sales in the city above $5 million and a 5.5% charge on sales above $10 million."

"On April 1, everything froze. In March, when the luxury market reached the peak of its frenzy, there were 126 home and condo sales above of $5 million in the city of L.A., according to the Multiple Listing Service. In April, once Measure ULA took effect, there were two. Oron Maher of Maher Commercial Realty said that over the past month negotiations have become a game of hot potato, with sellers and buyers both asking the other to cover the tax. 'Buyers are saying it’s a seller’s tax, but sellers are saying they can’t sell unless the buyer can raise the price,' he said. 'It’s all leading to less transactions.'"

Bisnow San Francisco in California. "Office owners in Silicon Valley are coping with a cascading set of challenges that began years ago with the pandemic and continue today. 'If you are the owner of an office asset, I don’t need to tell you that you are the proud owner of the most-hated asset class in America,' Briggs Development President Jeremy Rogers said."

From Storeys in Canada. "A foreclosure date has been set for several parcels of land relating to one of the 16 projects by Coromandel Properties listed in its petition seeking creditor protection, according to BC Supreme Court documents obtained by STOREYS. The named project is referred to as Alberta 40, a nod to its closest intersection — Alberta Street and W 40th Avenue. Sat one block away from the Oakridge Centre redevelopment, it’s comprised of of six parcels of land. According to the petition, filed by Coromandel Properties in February, the developer incrementally acquired the Alberta Street site between 2017 and 2022 for a total of $35.16M, with plans to build two 18-storey residential towers housing a total of 349 rental units. The Court noted, however, that no rezoning application has been advanced with the City of Vancouver because Coromandel Properties 'lack the funds to do so.' No rezoning application or development application exists on the City’s Shape Your City portal for any of the addresses."

"Lanyard filed their own foreclosure petition against Coromandel Properties in February. The amount owing as of February 16, 2023 is $16,716,882.45. According to Lanyard, daily interest is accruing at a rate of $4,840.15, an amount Lanyard points out can only be covered for three days by the rental income from the sites. Last week, STOREYS reported that Coromandel Properties was no longer involved in four projects it was co-developing with Peterson Group. According to provincial court registry filings, foreclosure proceedings have been initiated for at least eight of the remaining 12 projects."

The Times Colonist in Canada. "Real estate sales numbers and prices have softened this year compared to last year’s hot market as the number of properties on the market continues to climb. 'Sales numbers for this April are more moderate than the higher levels we’ve seen in recent years,' Victoria Real Estate Board chair Graden Sol said. The benchmark price for a single-family house in the Victoria core (Victoria, ­Esquimalt, Oak Bay, Saanich and View Royal) was $1.264 million last month. That was a decline from April 2022 at $1.423 million. Last month’s benchmark price for a condominium in the ­Victoria core was $565,000, down by 10.3 per cent from $630,200 the same month last year."

From NL Times. "Thanks to falling home prices and rising wages, first-time buyers will soon have more chances in the Dutch housing market, according to an analysis by economists Gerard Eijsink and Dorinth van Dijk of De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB). 'Affordability for starters will be better from mid-2023,' they said. Home prices in the Netherlands started falling in August last year, but not faster than mortgage interest rates increase. Any improvement in affordability is desperately needed. In 2022, a household with an average income of 67,500 euros could borrow up to 321,000 euros at an interest rate of 4%, while the average house price in the fourth quarter of last year was 415,000 euros. A study by Calcasa showed that at the end of 2022, the average first-time buyer could only afford 3.4 percent of homes available on the Dutch housing market."

The Manila Bulletin. "Whatever happens in the global economy, the Philippine economy is resilient enough to continue growing at 6 to 7 percent for the entire of 2023. What could experience a major slow down is the market for high-priced residential units, whether condominium or detached units. The same will hold true for office space since there is an ongoing glut due to the phasing our of the POGO business and increasing tendency of BPO-IT workers to work from home."

From Tribune 242. "It’s a process no one wants to see happen but it happens far more frequently than we realise. Want to know just how often and how many repossessed properties there are in The Bahamas? Just look up distressed properties on any bank’s website. One bank in particular does an exceptionally good job listing every vacant lot, single family home, commercial property, Grand Bahama and Family Island properties with geographical, site and physical descriptions along with pricing. There are more than ten pages of listings. Another bank has fewer distressed properties but generally higher in value. The listings of distressed properties on yet another bank’s website reflects risks of some neighbourhoods that seem to pop up most frequently."

"Property repossession is so common that just about every financial institution has a department or at least an individual assigned to it, even if they give it a fancier name. And there are real estate professionals who specialize in distressed property transactions. Of course, there are also smart investors with deep enough pockets to snatch what appears on a distressed property list quickly if it has potential and the price is right. Sometimes the lender has too much money in the game to make it worth a look."

"By the time a single-family residence is repossessed the story around it is pretty predictable. The same owner who could not make payments also could not afford the costs of repair and upkeep. So by the time the lender gets to court, the judge signs off on the right to repossess, the homeowner is served and due process takes place, the property in the middle of the tug-of-rights can be in a state of shambles."

"It’s this other side of what happens to the unintentional bystander victims of repossession that gets far too little attention. What happens to the house next door, across the street, what happens to the community? The lending institution takes ownership but not pride of ownership. They want to dump the property that turned out to be a bad deal. If you want to see how many there are, check out the bank websites noted above. Nearly every bank in The Bahamas has lists of distressed properties and distressed is the right word for most of them. And it is not just banks. Insurance companies, credit unions, other financiers all count on an individual’s or a company’s ability to pay back and all without fail have encountered the customer who at some point cannot or does not."

"So strewn throughout New Providence, Andros, Abaco, Exuma and nowhere more so than in Grand Bahama are distressed properties owned by a bank or lender, properties left to fester with overgrown weeds, peeling paint, fallen down gutters, tree limbs stretching across others’ yards. Pools become cesspits of mosquito larvae since there is no electricity to operate a pump. At night, there are no lights, making the abandoned property an open invitation for the homeless grateful for a roof over their heads and not the least concerned about rodents or who holds the title."