A report from Fortune. "Fed Chair Jerome Powell took the podium on Wednesday to announce that the central bank would hold interest rates flat in June. Powell didn't rule out future hikes, and called this move a 'skip.' At the end of November 2022, Powell said a "housing bubble" had formed during the Pandemic Housing Boom. 'Coming out of the pandemic, [mortgage] rates were very low, people wanted to buy houses, they wanted to get out of the cities and buy houses in the suburbs because of COVID," Powell said in November. 'So you really had a housing bubble, you had housing prices going up [at] very unsustainable levels and overheating and that kind of thing.'"

USA Today. "'What we'd like to see is credible evidence that inflation is topping out and begging to come down,' Powell said. 'We have to get inflation down to 2% and we will but we just don't see that.' He added, 'Perhaps more restraint (through higher rates) will be necessary than we thought at the last meeting.'"

11 Alive in Georgia. "'If you look at a couple of trends though, one of them is that... if you compared May to a year ago, average home prices actually have fallen,' said Emory University Goizueta Business School Associate Professor Raymond Hill. 'We had a peak that had been going up lately, but year-on-year home prices fell. They fell the most for the biggest houses... I don't think they fell at all for smaller houses.'"

KXAN in Texas. "Both sellers and buyers are seeing 'more opportunity' in the Austin housing market, according to the Austin Board of Realtors. The median price for homes sold in May was $467,500 across the Austin metro, a decline of 15% year-over-year. Since last May, the median sales price within Austin city limits fell from $667,000 to $550,000, a 17.5% decrease. In the same timeframe, median prices have dropped 18.5% in Travis County as a whole, 14.9% in Hays County, 13.6% in Williamson County, 9.6% in Caldwell County and 7.7% in Bastrop County."

The Coastal View in California. "Gone are the days of a seller just naming a price because their home has four walls. As you look at the median home price YTD through May there is a 7% drop comparing the first five months of 2023 to 2022. The big news over the last few weeks is that there are more listings! We have 20 properties available for sale and nine currently under contract in Carpinteria as of May 13, 2023. For Carpinteria specifically, we have had 33 homes and condos sales for the first five months of 2023. This is a 37% decrease compared to 2022 total sales of 52."

From Market Place. "In yesterday’s Consumer Price Index report, we saw that the cost of rent was up 8.7% year-over-year in May. That sounds like a lot, but it doesn’t fully reflect where rental prices are headed. A lot of long-awaited new apartments are finishing construction, says Taylor Marr at Redfin. 'Now the new supply is here. And it’s continuing to come. There’s nearly a million rental units right now that are under construction,' said Marr."

Wealth Management. "The borrowers who feel the squeeze the most took out floating-rate, short-term debt just before rates began to rise, when high-leverage capital was easily available and valuations of apartment properties were at their peak. Many of those loans are set to come due in the second half of 2023 and early 2024—and fatigued lenders are unlikely to offer extensions. 'Those are all starting to come due in the latter half of this year and the beginning of next year—so you're really just starting to see the beginnings of borrowers acting to get out of those deals,' says Kyle Draeger, a senior managing director for CBRE Multifamily."

"ANAX Real Estate Partners plans to provide $200 million in rescue capital over the next 18 months to apartment properties in New York City that need an infusion of capital. Each of the properties that ANAX has considered so far is a partially-built multifamily development that no longer has enough capital to finish construction. In some cases construction has stopped entirely, and ANAX is working with at least one construction lender who seized an unfinished building."

"They are similar in that in many cases, apartment owners have realized the value of their properties have changed as interest rates rose – taking some of their equity with it. 'In many cases, if you can get 50 percent of your equity back, isn't that a win?,' says Eric Brody, founder of ANAX. 'We realized that with the way that the interest rates went up, I don't care what the net operating income was, it did not cover the higher interest rate.'"

The Real Deal on Illinois. "A venture that owns a Rolling Meadows office building has hammered the final nail in the coffin on its investment, as it plans to hand the keys to the lender on a $23 million debt and kiss the property good-bye. The venture, led by Chicago real estate investor Chet Balder, plans to give back the 12-story, 256,000-square-foot office building at 1600 Golf Road, Crain’s reported. Balder lost one of its largest tenants last year and stopped making payments on a $20.6 million loan balance tied to the property earlier this year. Rather than trying to revive its holding, the Balder venture isn’t planning to fight its lender to hold onto the property — a common theme amongst office landlords who have struggled to overcome the remote work movement ramped up by the pandemic."

The Globe and Mail. "While many Canadians still aspire to own a lakeside haven or oceanfront retreat, the frenzy to buy has subsided to a languid search. Anita Latner, broker with Anita Latner Realty Inc., says the sprint to find a safe haven that spurred on competition in 2021 has slowed to a calmer pace in many parts of Ontario cottage country. 'It was really panic buying during the pandemic,' she says of the frenzy that saw 10 or 15 bidders vying for one property in some cases. During the winter months of 2021, buyers were trudging through knee-deep snow to view properties and submitting unconditional offers without the benefit of a home inspection. In some areas, prices skyrocketed by more than 100 per cent in one year."

"Ms. Latner says some of the more impulsive buyers during that time may have discovered they’re not really cottagers, while others may have discovered flaws such as a weedy shoreline or water too shallow for swimming when the snow melted. The spring market so far has been a little bit sluggish, in her opinion. Some properties are selling quickly at good prices while others are languishing if they are priced too high. 'A lot of the sellers still have pandemic eyes and the buyers are over it.'"

"In a swathe of Ontario cottage country that includes waterfront property sales tumbled 32.9 per cent in the first four months of the year compared with the same period in 2022, according to the Lakelands Association of Realtors. The median price in April was $973,500 for a waterfront property, which marks a decline of 19.2 per cent from the median price of $1.205-million in April of last year. In April of 2020, the median price was $535,000, according to Lakelands."

From The I in the UK. "A serious housing market downturn is in progress. So what now? In 2017 I bought a flat with my ex-boyfriend. It’s exactly the sort of home I wanted to live in, so I was over the moon. It has also spared me years of extortionate rents and dodgy landlords, giving me the sort of stability that actually makes it possible to build a life. But, while I have no regrets, I am currently in negative equity, having to pay the bank to remortgage and buy my former boyfriend out and, when all is said and done, pretty sure that it will turn out to be the worst financial decision I ever made."

"Worse than using credit cards at university. Worse than that time I took out a personal loan to pay letting fees before they were banned. Worse than the one time I used a Buy Now, Pay Later scheme (to buy a Dyson AirWrap, if you’re interested. Would recommend). Why? Because house prices are falling, and interest rates are rising. To know that the housing market is in trouble you don’t need to know that the average house in the UK currently costs around nine times’ average earnings, based on data as of 30 November 2022. Or that the last time house prices were this expensive relative to average earnings was in 1876 (nearly 150 years ago). Or, even, that core inflation is embedded, and lenders are increasing their mortgage rates."

"All you need to do is look in an estate agent’s window in the cold light of day in London and ask yourself if a one-bedroom flat like mine could ever be worth nearly half a million pounds. If it ever was?"

From News.com.au. "More than half of Australians say Philip Lowe should lose his job after jacking up interest rates, according to a new poll. The Resolve Political Monitor survey of 1606 voters conducted for The Sydney Morning Herald found 52 per cent believe the embattled Reserve Bank governor should get the boot when his term expires in September. Asked who is primarily responsible for keeping inflation down, 33 per cent of voters in the Resolve Political Monitor Survey said it was the RBA — but 44 per cent pointed the finger at the federal government."

"Writing in The Australian Financial Review last week, economist Steven Hamilton argued 'the government’s claims this is all someone else’s fault are increasingly untenable,' saying 'there should be no doubt in the mind of any economist' that the budget’s energy subsidies and other spending would drive up inflation.'"

"But Prof Hamilton noted the root of the problem went back much further. 'There’s a longer-run story — we certainly haven’t experienced rates of this level since around 2007, so really over the past 15 years we’ve had a period of very low interest rates that I think put in people’s minds the notion that it would be like that forever,' he said. 'People buying houses now for the first time have never experienced high or even moderate interest rates in their working lives. I think this is why this kind of moderating interest rate environment has come as such a shock, both psychologically but also economically. People did make long-run financial decisions on the basis that things would be like that forever.'"

Stuff New Zealand. "Homeowners in suburbs with the biggest house price falls need not panic over finding themselves in negative equity, while the current housing market provides a gilt-edged opportunity for first time buyers, one expert says. Fresh off the back of CoreLogic’s latest Mapping the Market analysis of the hardest-hit suburbs, OPS Partners economist Ed McKnight joins Newsable to explain negative equity. 'Negative equity is when the value of your mortgage is larger than the value of your house,' he explains. Those homeowners who find themselves in this situation should stay the course, McKnight advises."

"'Let's say you purchased at the top of the market, chances are you're probably not going to move house for another five odd years from today. So there is a very good chance that by the time you come to sell that property it will likely have increased in value and recovered it,' he said. McKnight thinks there are 'a lot of smart young people out there' looking at the decline in house prices in Auckland and Lower Hutt (22% and 30% respectively), 'saying I think we're going to buy now because A, we can afford to, and B, there are a lot more options out there on the market.'"