A report from KOMO-TV in Washington. "According to Redfin, luxury home prices dropped by double digits in several west coast cities. San Francisco saw the biggest loss of more than 12.7% in a year. Seattle is close behind at a 12.3% drop. Why the big dip? Tech-heavy towns like Seattle and San Francisco saw some of the largest price increases over the last few years. Now, they have farther to fall. 'We're not seeing multiple offers,' said Redfin Premier agent Bliss Ong 'A lot of luxury can pay cash, so they are paying cash, but if they are paying cash they do want some kind of a discount.'"

The San Francisco Examiner in California. "It’s getting cheaper to buy a house in San Francisco. The City saw some of the biggest year-over-year housing price declines in recent years, a new study from SmartAsset found. According to the company, The City’s typical home value went down from roughly $1.46 million in 2022 to $1.27 million this year, a 13.3% decrease. Oscar Wei, deputy chief economist at the California Association of Realtors, said he believes that San Francisco’s year-over-year decline in typical home value will continue in small increments throughout the year, especially as the traditional home buying season wraps up in the fall."

The Marina Times in California. "According to the San Francisco Association of Realtors, the median price for a single family home in San Francisco in June was $1,700,000, down 11.6 percent from June 2022. The median price for a condo was $1,218,274, down just 5.5 percent from the previous year. 'An inescapable frustration seems to have imbued life in San Francisco,' said Matt Fuller, cofounder at Jackson Fuller Real Estate. 'People feel frustrated and want change: They are tired of vandals and vagrants on sidewalks, police that are absent or too aggressive, ineffective city leadership, the expensive cost of living, and the continuing closure of longtime favorite restaurants, breweries, and shops.' He asked rhetorically, when all is said and done, 'Is the juice of San Francisco worth the squeeze?' It all adds up to an exhausting real estate market. But perhaps there is hope in a famous proverb, dating back to at least 1650, that says, 'It’s always darkest before the dawn.'"

The Commercial Observer on Texas. "On the surface, everything appears to be as smooth as oil in Houston. Still, all is not well in The Bayou City — especially in the city’s sprawling downtown and central business districts, and in its office sector in particular. San Felipe Plaza, a 959,000-square-foot office tower built in 1982, sold for $83 million in March, half of the $165 million the building was sold for in 2005 and a fraction of the $219 million value the building had been appraised at prior to the pandemic. A vast majority of Houston’s 30 million square feet of downtown office product was built prior to 1986, so not only is the office product relatively obsolete, but so are the surrounding neighborhoods and streets that lack residences or mixed-use living spaces. 'There’s just a lot of buildings where you can put any rent number on there and no one would be interested,' said Matthew Werner, managing director of REIT strategies at Chilton Capital Management."

"But if the office sector is bleeding out, then the multifamily world is turning into a dangerous laceration. Over the past four years, Jay Gajavelli’s Applesway Investment Group borrowed $230 million to create a Houston rental empire of more than 3,200 units. Swapnil Agarwal’s Houston-based firm Nitya Capital created a 20,000-unit portfolio valued at $1 billion within 10 years of his 2013 entrance into the market. But the swiftest interest rate increase in 40 years in 2022 and 2023 spoiled the plans these syndicators had for a never-ending stream of easy investor dollars fueled by the promise of permanent rent spikes and quickly flipped properties. A series of articles by the Wall Street Journal portrayed Gajavelli and other multifamily syndicators as acquisition companies masquerading as landlords."

"'You had players that came into multifamily that didn’t understand how to operate properties, so the bad deals came from speculation,' said Daniel Oney, research director of the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University. 'There’s a lot of talent and skill that goes into maintaining an apartment complex, keeping it up, promoting it, and some of the deals that have gone bad you saw people focused on the financing side, but they didn’t think about the operation side, and now they’re getting bitten because the property is less desirable.'"

From Reuters. "Commercial real estate investors and lenders are slowly confronting an ugly question - if people never again shop in malls or work in offices the way they did before the pandemic, how safe are the fortunes they piled into bricks and mortar? Cities like London, Los Angeles and New York are bloated with buildings local populations no longer want or need. 'Employers are beginning to appreciate that building giant facilities to warehouse their people is no longer necessary,' Richard Murphy, political economist at the UK's Sheffield University, told Reuters. 'Commercial landlords should be worried. Investors in them would be wise to quit now.'"

"Charles-Henry Monchau, Chief Investment Officer at Bank Syz likened the impact of aggressive rate tightening to dynamite fishing. 'Usually the small fishes come to the surface first, then the big ones – the whales - come last,' he said. 'Was Credit Suisse the whale? Was SVB the whale? We'll only know afterwards. But the whale could be commercial real estate in the U.S.'"

From Politico. "Oh, Switzerland — that beautiful land of financial stability, reliability and everything being just a little dull. Not anymore. As Credit Suisse, Europe's 19th biggest lender, goes down the tubes, becoming the most dramatic banking casualty since the 2008 financial crisis, the worry now is it turns out to be the first domino in a chain that stretches round the world. After all, we've been here before and it wasn't pretty. And if boring, safe Switzerland can't save its banks, then, well, who the hell can?"

"In a bid to calm nerves after the Swiss decision, a trio of European oversight bodies — the Single Resolution Board, the European Banking Authority and the ECB's supervisory arm — released a joint statement to reassure investors that in case of a bank collapse in the EU, shareholders would suffer first. And the Bank of England jumped on the bandwagon. 'Holders of such instruments should expect to be exposed to losses in resolution or insolvency in the order of their positions in this hierarchy,' it said. In other words: Please don't start panicking."

From ABC News. "Brisbane real estate agent Jett Jones is busy reselling properties that have only recently changed hands. 'A lot of the first-time buyers that might have overextended the budget have come back and said, 'Yeah, look, we need to sell,' Ms Jones explains. 'Or a lot of the time as well we've had investors that have said, 'Yeah, we want to retire,' or, 'We need to get rid of it because it's costing too much for us to keep the property now.' Almost 14 per cent of homes sold across Australia in April had previously changed hands within the three years prior. Hobart had the highest portion of properties resold within three years, at almost 16 per cent, followed by Brisbane (15.2 per cent) and the ACT (13.9 per cent)."

"'We've seen these short-term loss-making resales of two years or less go from 3.4 per cent of loss-making resales in the March quarter of 2022 to over 12 per cent in the March quarter of 2023,' says CoreLogic's head of Australian research, Eliza Owen. 'So a lot more short-term sellers are willing to sell at a loss at the moment.' She believes that is indicative of an increase in forced sales, as people who purchased at ultra-low interest rates during the pandemic period find they can no longer keep up with surging mortgage repayments. 'You might infer that it could be people having no choice but to sell into a market that's not as strong as when they purchased,' she says. 'So that could be because of issues of mortgage serviceability.'"

"Ms Owen says the top five local government areas for loss-making quick resales are Brisbane, the Gold Coast, the Central Coast north of Sydney, Parramatta in Sydney's west and Fairfield in the city's south-west. Most of those areas also appear at the top of Domain's list of 'distressed listings,' which is based on key terms in property advertisements such as 'urgent sale,' 'desperate seller, 'mortgagee in possession' or similar."

The South China Morning Post. "Struggling to scrape together enough cash, local officials from some of China's most debt-ridden regions feel as though they've exhausted all options - and some have even posted about their plights online, in hopes of garnering much-needed assistance from the central government. But such comments have been quickly removed. Deteriorating finances across the country, particularly in its poorest provinces such as Guizhou, have raised the spectre of a looming local government debt crisis. Beijing sees the potential for a meltdown in China's predominantly state-owned banking system as a 'grey rhino' risk - big, obvious and neglected."

"Fears continue to mount over possible defaults in the listed market by local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), hybrid entities that are both public and corporate and were created to skirt restrictions on local government borrowing and have proliferated since the global financial crisis in 2008. In the mid-1990s the central government implemented budget laws to stop local authorities from accumulating large piles of debt. In response, regional governments crafted LGFVs as a workaround. There are now thousands of such vehicles in China, driving investments in bridges, roads, homes and industrial parks, and boosting the country's gross domestic product (GDP)."

"But at the same time, tales of extravagantly wasteful spending in white-elephant projects, including 'ghost cities,' have made headlines and raised eyebrows across China, in some cases enraging local residents. Li Xunlei, chief economist and head of research at Zhongtai Securities, estimated that the aforementioned Guizhou - one of China's poorest and most indebted provinces - had built a total of 8,331km of highways by the end of 2022. In comparison, Japan's expressways span about 7,800km, while Guizhou's GDP is less than one-fifteenth of Japan's."

"The International Monetary Fund estimated that the total debt amassed by China's LGFVs had swollen to a record 66 trillion yuan (US$9.23 trillion) this year - more than doubling since 2017, when the total was 30.7 trillion yuan. There has not yet been a default among LGFVs traded in the exchanges, but Guangfa Securities estimated that there were a total of 73 defaults in LGFVs sold in private transactions in the first quarter this year - a record high since the brokerage started collecting such data in 2018. These were mostly vehicles in Guizhou and Shandong provinces."

The Wall Street Journal. "While the rest of the world tussles with inflation, China is at risk of experiencing a prolonged spell of falling prices that—if it takes root—could eat into corporate profits, sap consumer spending and push more people out of work. Some economists see alarming parallels between China’s current predicament and the experience of Japan, which struggled for years with deflation and stagnant growth. In the 1990s, a collapse in stock markets and real-estate values in Japan pushed companies and households to drastically cut back spending to service burdensome debts—a so-called balance-sheet recession that some see taking shape in China today."

"In Shanghai, Liu Wang has held off on plans to upgrade his apartment because he is worried about sinking more money into a property whose value he believes could keep dropping. 'The economic condition is highly uncertain now,' said Liu, who works at a logistics firm that is shifting its focus toward domestic business after its export business weakened. In his hometown of Qufu in China’s northeastern Shandong province, demand for homes has been tepid despite a drop in prices, he said. 'The housing bubble is still quite large,' Liu added. 'I don’t see any reason why prices will go up.'"