A report from CBS 5. "The Valley housing market is cooling down, experts said, correcting after what used to be one of the hottest markets in the country. Median home prices are down more than $50,000 from this time last year. 'The prices went down anywhere from 8-10% depending on where you went in the Valley,' said Sindy Ready, First Vice President of Arizona Realtors. 'Sellers are going to have to get a little more realistic.'"

The Dallas Morning News. "May single-family home sales in Dallas-Fort Worth declined just 2% from a year before with 8,805 transactions, according to a new report from the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University and North Texas Real Estate Information Systems. The median price of a single-family home last month was $412,500, down 5% from a year ago but up 2.5% from April. Collin County’s home sales were up 4%, while its median price was down 9% to $539,000. Single-family building permits in the area hit a record high in March 2022, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center. That gave buyers plenty of options to choose from when those homes wrapped up construction this spring."

"'You have all these units coming on the market to absorb the demand that we’re seeing this spring in housing,' said Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist for Zillow. 'That’s a positive for homebuyers.'"

From KBOI Boise. "According to a report from Boise Regional Realtors, the housing market in Idaho has been fluctuating. In Ada County, the median sales price for a single-family home in May 2023 landed at $534,900, a $17,400 boost from last month. Existing homes faced the largest adjustment in median sales prices this month, bogging by $75,000."

The Naples Daily News in Florida. "Collier County's property values are up by more than 18.5% over last year. Taxable values grew by 10.7% in Naples, by 12.8% on Marco Island and by 6.4% in Everglades City. Jenny Blaje Plock, director of tax roll compliance/data management at the Collier County Property Appraiser's office, said the hike in values from 2021 to 2022 is the largest one-year increase she's seen in her 26-plus years on the job. 'We saw something similar between 2004-2006 where values jumped 22% from ’04 to ’05, then another 30% from ’05 to ’06,' she noted. 'Then there was a steady stream of years of decreasing values up until 2011-2012 – before the market started to come back.'"

The Washington Post. "Like other commercial landlords and lenders in downtowns across the country, 555 California is staring down a major pandemic downturn in the commercial real estate market. Economists warn the situation could portend disaster, risking parts of the banking system, too. 'It’s scary,” said a finance worker based out of 555 California, regarding plummeting office building valuations in the area. In the more than 20 years she has worked in the building, the woman — who spoke on the condition of anonymity because her employer doesn’t allow staff to comment publicly — said she has never seen it so empty."

"Amazon has pulled back on developing major real estate projects — including its second headquarters known as HQ2 — in Virginia and Tennessee. Google pressed pause on plans to build an 80-acre campus in San Jose — the heart of Silicon Valley. Comcast, one of the biggest employers in Philadelphia, is pulling out of some office buildings there. Brookfield, a major office building landlord in Los Angeles, has defaulted on more than $1 billion of commercial real estate loans in recent months, according to Bloomberg. And in D.C., where real estate firm CBRE reports office vacancy has continued to increase to about 20 percent, some landlords struggling to find tenants are feeling 'desperate.'"

"Few cities have attracted as much attention over ongoing distress as San Francisco. Rachel Leamy, who has run three shoeshine stands here called the Shoeshine Guild for more than 20 years, said she’s been through many booms and busts — including the tech bubble of the early 2000s and the 2008 financial crisis. But now, 'it’s a damn ghost town,' said Leamy."

From Fox Business. "Shopping center giant Westfield is walking away from its San Francisco Centre mall, becoming the latest major company to leave the California city amid rampant crime problems. 'The Westfield San Francisco Centre is arguable the heart of retail in San Francisco,' John Dennis, chairman of the California Republican Party told Fox Business. 'Another massive loss for the worst managed city in America. What's scary is we're nowhere near the bottom.'"

The San Francisco Chronicle. "The real story is that downtown San Francisco — and I mean this with absolute respect — sucks. Pre-pandemic, developers built a s—tload of pricey condos in this part of town, anticipating that interest rates would never go up and that wealthy young tech professionals working at Twitter, etc., would want to live right where the action was. Then the pandemic hit. There is no action here anymore; Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst for Compass in the San Francisco Bay Area, told me that downtown is the weakest market in not just the Bay Area but the entire country. 'It’s a complete flip from five years ago,' he said. 'People, they just left.'"

"Most of the open houses I attended downtown were barren, but none of them had early birds taking advantage like in Walnut Creek. Between open houses, I saw some poop on the sidewalk and marked it down on my bingo card, but it wasn’t like I was strolling down Bourbon Street at 3 a.m. You know what I didn’t see? A f—king restaurant. There were long stretches of downtown San Francisco where I couldn’t find a single bite. Not a restaurant. Not a corner store. Not even a goddamn Panera. I toured a $5 million pied-a-terre that had been on the market for so long that the agent dejectedly told me, 'I stopped counting,' when I asked how many days it had been sitting empty.'"

Multi-Housing News. "While COVID-19 spurred a more rapid movement away from city centers than anyone could have imagined, many of the projects now benefiting from this exodus have been planned for years. Carol Enoch, CEO at real estate consultancy Enoch & Co noted that her firm was working with developers in what were then third-tier markets a decade ago. 'We started looking at development and tertiary markets 10 years ago,' said Enoch, who said that some of these projects delivered around 2020, just as demand in those places spiked. There were other projects that didn’t go online immediately, leading to a flurry of unveilings. 'We’ve got a glut of supply that’s temporary right now due to the pressure that built up due to construction delays during COVID.'"

The Peterborough Examiner in Canada. "Home prices in Peterborough city and county are continuing to rebound after a plunge in values from the all-time high prices set in early 2022. After the average price dropped to a little more than $600,000 to start the year, May’s average price was $716,493, the Peterborough and the Kawarthas Association of Realtors reported. That’s down 14.3 per cent from a year ago. The overall MLS Home Price Index composite/single-family benchmark price was $656,600 in May, down 17.5 per cent compared to May 2022."

BBC News in the UK. "Conversations about mortgage rates are no longer confined to the dinner party circuit or the golf course. People are talking about their mortgage shock with friends at the school gates or in the supermarket. Anil and Jessica Jhamat, from Solihull, are having to find an extra £550 a month. They bought their home during the stamp duty holiday, which allowed them to purchase 'a house we wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford.' 'We assumed interest rates would stay low, otherwise we'd have taken out a five-year fix,' Mr Jhamat said. 'Hindsight is a wonderful thing.' The pharmacist and his wife, a digital manager, also have to find £1,000 a month in childcare fees for their one-year-old son. 'Where we are now, we've lost what we saved [in stamp duty]. Essentially we're back to square one,' he said."

Daily Mail Australia. "A couple battling cancer have been left devastated after a construction company went bust leaving their forever home unfinished. Victorian couple Bridget Schultz and her husband Bill were given the shock of their lives when builder Rawdon Hill went into liquidation on May 25. Mrs Schultz and her partner have now been left with an unfinished home in La Trobe Valley. The couple are renting and have issued a desperate plea for help as their development sits empty and incomplete. Rawdon Hill marketed itself as a low-volume builder with 46 years of experience. In April its general manager Peter Grant vowed to complete all homes it had started."

"'We will proudly finish every single home in our strong pipeline, while we continue to pay everyone on time, every time – guaranteed,' Mr Grant said in an advertisement in Star News. According to one estimate 1753 construction companies have gone broke since July 1, 2022. Dr Angela Jackson from Impact Economics and Policy, said the pain is far from over for businesses and consumers. She warned there are 'darker days' still to come because of rising inflation and continual interest rate rises."

The Voice of Vietnam. "'Misery, unattractiveness, deficiency' have been the three words used in a recent report by the Vietnam Association of Realtors (VARS) to describe the dire situation of realty firms amid the economic downturn. DKRA Group said the resort real estate was stuck in limbo as most of the products in the segment can't sell. The global economic depression hit so hard that the demand for villas and shophouses fell by 98% and 99%, respectively, in April."

"A VARS expert said financially-drained realty firms were 'drowning'. Despite their attempt to trim ranks, few could keep their heads above water. 'Problems in the sector remain unsolved for quite a while, driving firms into distress,' said the expert. In the first five months of 2023, 554 realty firms went out of business, up 30.4% year-on-year. Others became worse off as their revenue and profit fell by nearly 7% and 40%, respectively. Six of the 20 largest had to shed staff to offset the fall in sales. A noteworthy one was Dat Xanh Group, which cut headcounts by 41% last year. Novaland Group followed suit with a cut of 20%."

"But the bad news doesn't stop there. Layoffs continued into 2023, with more employees losing their jobs here and there. Notably, Dat Xanh made additional 1,384 redundancies in Q1. 'Firms have been stretched to their limit. If they are left drowning in hardship for longer, mass bankrupcies would be inevitable,' he added."

From Business Insider. "A Chinese property developer is offering free gold bars to homebuyers in a desperate bid to boost home sales in an ailing housing market. However, the campaign has since been suspended, with multiple buyers saying they've experienced monthslong waits for their promised gold. The property developer in question is Huafa Group, which is based in Hangzhou, a city in eastern China. The developer was trying to move units in a development called Huafa Hui Tianfu."

"The giveaways come as developers find themselves in a struggling housing market. In May, the number of homes sold across 50 key Chinese cities dropped 17.7% as compared to April, per the China Index Academy. An oversupply of unsold flats in China means that it's a buyer's market right now, the Wall Street Journal reported in April. And that means even free gold bars may not be enough when it comes to coaxing Chinese home buyers."

"'The gold offer hasn't yet helped people make up their minds,' a local real estate agent told Sixth Tone. 'And given how the market is, buyers are not in a hurry to make a final decision,' the agent added."