It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "The Austin housing market is starting to look a lot more like 2019. For the past three years, multiple offers, bidding wars and all-cash deals became the norm in Central Texas. Now, the picture is changing. Last month, residential home sales in the metro area declined 8.5% year over year to 3,147 closed sales while the median price dropped 9.6% to $483,000. The number of homes on the market jumped 38.4% to 9,631 active listings. Realtor Warren McEnulty has seen the Austin real estate downshift firsthand. 'Realistically, it doesn't seem like we're going to see any price increases for the remainder of the year,' he said. 'It just seems right now that prices are going to continue to fall.'"

"A former Morgan Stanley financial advisor has pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering in what prosecutors said was a $7 million scam. The advisor, Shawn Edward Good, was a vice president in Morgan Stanley's Wilmington, North Carolina. Caitlin Andrews said she began investing with Good in 2014, opening her Morgan Stanley account with approximately $1.7 million from a divorce settlement. Good pitched her on a plan that would allow her to leverage her holdings to invest in an Airbnb in her beach-side community, earning her extra income with minimal risk. Early last year investigators from the IRS and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigators contacted her about the money transfers from her brokerage account to Good."

"'I remember one of the women was really nice, and she said, 'Do you know that you are missing X amount of money?' Andrews recalled. 'And I said, 'No, I'm not.' Then the agent instructed her to scroll down to the section about her line of credit. 'If you go down to how much I owed, no, I didn't have any money,' Andrews said. At that point, the agent started crying, she said. 'And I knew that when the law enforcement agent starts crying on your behalf, that things are really bad.'"

"Andrews said that she stressed to Good from the outset that the money was everything that she had. As a single mother, her earning power was limited. 'It's what I lived off of, it's what I paid groceries off of, it's what I paid my mortgage off of,' she said, explaining what she told Good. 'It was my sons' college education, it was health insurance, it was everything. He took my boys out for ice cream while he was stealing their college funds,' Andrews told the judge."

"The investors who wanted to buy a piece of a trophy office building in Atlanta on the CrowdStreet platform come from all walks of life. These investors are now bound together for a more ignominious reason: They are out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars after Nightingale allegedly misappropriated their investments, moving more than $8M into other accounts and never closing on the deal, an independent fiduciary said. 'I don’t think you ever go into an investment thinking they’re just going to wipe me out,' said Eli Johnson, an accredited investor out of Chicago who put $25K of equity into Nightingale. 'It’s not like you’re trading bitcoin in Nigeria or something.'"

"The Nightingale scandal is dramatic, but investors in the deals won’t be the only ones on the platform who will see big losses in office buildings go up in smoke over the next year or two, said real estate receivership and troubled asset manager Henry Lorber. 'Go downtown wherever you are, the evidence is all right there in your city,' Lorber said. 'It is probably one of the single worst investment strategies I have ever heard of. Crowdfunding for real estate, it’s nuts! It’s great in a market that’s moving up, maybe. But if it’s moving down, it’s a catastrophe.'"

"The Gas Company Tower was valued at a whopping $632M in 2021, but the value of the 52-story Downtown property has fallen to less than half that. The tower, owned by a Brookfield fund focused on Downtown LA offices, has been valued at $270M, The Real Deal reported, citing data from Trepp and Morningstar Credit. The updated value of the building is well below the $465M in loans Brookfield has on the tower. Los Angeles isn't alone. Class-A office property values are down 35% on average from their pre-pandemic peak, according to GlobeSt, citing Green Street data."

"Brookfield has been one of the highest-profile companies to struggle with plunging office values. It has handed back keys to properties in New York and Chicago in addition to Los Angeles. In Denver, a property partially owned by Brookfield called Republic Plaza saw its value fall by 44% in the last 10 years, Bisnow reported."

"An attempt to sell off a pair of office towers in downtown Vancouver is being carefully watched by the commercial real estate world. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Oxford Properties, the real estate arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, are reportedly planning to unload the neighbouring towers on Dunsmuir and West Georgia Street, according to Bloomberg , which said the sellers hope to fetch $350 million. Carl Gomez, chief economist at CoStar isn’t sure the Vancouver building occupied by Amazon will fetch the price the pension funds that own it are said to be seeking."

"In a scenario where a seller hopes to get $350 million for an office complex based on past assumptions of a cap rate of four per cent, but the market assesses the cap rate at eight per cent, the drop in value is about 50 per cent, putting the sale price at $175 million. 'This is just an example of how things work since its theoretical,' he said."

"The German property industry will ask the government for multi-billion euro support at a meeting with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, people familiar with the matter said, as gloom engulfs the nation's real-estate sector in its worst crisis in decades. Europe's largest economy is undergoing a major change of fortune after an end to the era of cheap money that fed a decade-long property boom. The industry now faces insolvencies, fizzling transactions and falling prices. Transactions have collapsed, down 59% during the first half of the year from a year ago, according to property consultancy, JLL. Home prices dropped 6.8% in the first quarter, the biggest fall since Germany's statistics office began compiling the figures."

"In Frankfurt, Germany's banking capital, multiple cranes swerve on the horizon as they construct additions to the city's skyline. 'But these are the projects that were launched in the last four to five years,' said Simone Zapke, head of construction supervision in Frankfurt. For the foreseeable future, building will remain in 'a valley of tears,' she said."

"Australia’s largest landlords have announced a string of downgrades to the values of their office block portfolios over the past month, but not by enough to humour investors. While publicly traded commercial real estate markets have plunged, the hit to unit prices has not shown up fully in asset valuations, creating a stalemate between relatively upbeat landlords and buyers waiting for deeper discounts. Office blocks are at the centre of the standoff. 'Buyers aren’t willing to pay the price from the last valuations,' said Winston Sammut, an investment manager at Sequoia Financial Group. 'You can put a value on stuff but if no one’s wiling to pay that price, it’s not a true value.'"

"Dexus last month sold a premium downtown Sydney skyscraper for A$393 million, a 17% discount to the December valuation. Faced with the prospect of big discounts, owners are pulling sales. U.S. private equity giant Blackstone and Chinese insurer Ping An both paused high-profile Sydney office block sales this year after lowball bids, local media reported. Growing pressure on owners to pay investors scrambling out of unlisted property funds may ultimately force them to sell buildings to raise cash, effectively breaking the deadlock, Sammut said. 'Money is queuing up to get out before the valuations are fully adjusted for the rate increases,' he said. 'As more redemptions come through, it creates pressure for more sales.'"

"Nothing symbolizes the demise of China Evergrande Group like the Hong Kong tower that it bought for a record $1.6 billion. Once a jewel in the developer’s crown, creditors are still trying to sell the building almost a year after seizing it. Refurbishments and a name change to steer clear of the disgraced defaulter have failed to convince buyers at a time when Hong Kong’s office market is going through its worst downturn in years. Three of its 11 elevators weren’t running because the developer had failed to pay the contractor, said Godfrey Cheng, deputy senior director at Savills (Hong Kong), an agent for the receivers. Maintenance work has since begun, Cheng said."

"That hasn’t been enough to boost the value of the tower, with the low end estimated at almost $1 billion below what Evergrande paid for it in 2015, suggesting severe losses for the company and the lenders behind the loans that it backed. It’s also a blow to other creditors who are waiting for recovery from a debt restructuring plan, which the developer is now trying to expedite after this week revealing losses totaling $81 billion in long-delayed results."

"Cattle wander between the concrete shells of half-finished mansions in northeastern China, some of the only occupants of a luxury complex whose crumbling verandas and overgrown arches are stark symbols of a housing market crippled by its own excess. Property giant Greenland Group broke ground on the development nestled in the hills around Shenyang, an industrial city of 9 million, in 2010 -- when the real estate sector's lightning growth was in full swing. But around two years later, the State Guest Mansions project -- lavishly planned as 260 European-style villas complete with swanky facilities for visitors of the provincial government -- was abandoned."

"Local farmers now plough land that was envisaged as manicured gardens for the wealthy and politically connected, while feral dogs patrol crudely built poultry pens and double garages crammed with hay bales and farm equipment. 'Frankly, it was because of official corruption,' a farmer named Guo told AFP as he dug for edible weeds beneath a creaking 10-metre-high metal fence screening the development from a nearby highway. 'They cut off the funding and cracked down on uncontrolled developments, so it was left half-finished,' the swarthy 45-year-old said, as other people carried off buckets of water from the complex's artificial lake."

"Ghost towns like the one in Shenyang -- known as 'rotten-tail' homes in Chinese -- now pockmark urban landscapes across the country. 'These (homes) would have sold for millions -- but the rich haven't even bought one of them,' said Guo. 'They weren't built for ordinary people.'"