A report from The Hill. "SmartAsset analyzed the 100 largest metro areas in the U.S. In Boise, nearly twice as many homes are being listed than sold, and the median number of days a house sits on the market is 20, marking a 186 percent increase since the same time last year. The Austin-Round Rock-Georgetown, Texas metro area follows Boise in the second spot on SmartAsset’s list. This central Texas metro area has experienced the fourth largest decrease in demand and the 13th largest price reductions. Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler, Ariz.; San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, Calif.; and Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, Nev., hold the final three spots in the top five of SmartAsset’s list of fastest-cooling real estate markets."

"The Phoenix metro boasts the highest percentage of listed homes with price cuts, while the Silicon Valley metro, San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara has experienced more than a 43 percent decrease in the number of houses sold since the same time in 2021. In the Las Vegas metro, the number of houses sold monthly has fallen by about 44 percent over the past year. Nationwide, close to 26 percent of homes listed experienced price reductions in August, up from 16 percent in 2021."

Local Profile on Texas. "According to the Collin County Association of Realtors (CCAR), the median sales price for homes sat at $539,580, a decline of 5.3% from the same period last year. A county-by-county report by MetroTex found that in Collin County homes remained for 36 days on the market, 18 more days than in June 2022 and closed sales dropped 0.6%. Additionally, ATTOM’s foreclosure activity report released Jul 13, 2023 shows that foreclosure filings in the U.S. rose 13% in the first six months of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022 and 185% when compared to the same period in 2021."

The Miami Herald in Florida. "One of the largest lenders behind a development company with ties to Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has sued to recover $15 million due on a loan that was used to buy two parcels in Miami Beach for a now-stalled commercial and residential project. The lawsuit is the first filed by a lender since developer Rishi Kapoor lost control of his real estate company, Location Ventures, and stepped down as its CEO last week. The project at 1234-1260 Washington Ave., already saddled with liens by contractors and other vendors, was shut down in late June by city officials for lacking permits while being built along the gentrifying commercial thoroughfare in South Beach."

"Ricky Arriola, a city commissioner who supported the project, said he fears there could now be 'significant delays.' 'I hope that the receivership process goes quickly and that this project ends up in the hands of a competent developer who can finish it so that it doesn’t lay dormant,' Arriola said. 'Nothing worse than an unfinished project.'"

The Chicago Sun Times in Illinois. "Whatever our station in life, many of us can pause and give thanks that we don’t own a portfolio of office buildings. The bigger concern is loans coming due soon that they can’t pay because rental income is drying up. The situation applies equally downtown and in the suburbs. Many landlords owe more in debt than the property is worth. At the start of the year, analysts predicted about a 25% drop in valuations. Now, some experts venture that valuations will fall 40% from pre-pandemic levels, a real fiscal tremor. No one is sure when the market will stabilize."

"Tech firms are huge in this. Salesforce, having backed a new office tower on Wolf Point, has thrown 119,000 square feet back on the market, and Facebook wants to sublease 115,000 square feet at 151 N. Franklin St., commercial real estate firm CBRE reported. In the suburbs, vacancies are reported to be more than 25%. CBRE said loan distress is 'limiting the pool of buildings with the stability and capital needed to finalize transactions.'"

The Philadelphia Inquirer in Pennsylvania. "So when can we expect to start seeing obsolete office buildings being transformed into much needed apartments? Don’t hold your breath. 'It’s very, very difficult to convert office to residential,' said Jim Pearlstein, president of Pearl Properties, at a June Center City District meeting. 'I have a lot of nightmare stories.' Converting an office building into apartments isn’t necessarily radically cheaper than building a new multifamily structure. At a Center City District event in April, co-head of JLL’s Philadelphia office division, Ryan Ade, estimated that converting an old building could cost 75% of building a new one."

"'I’m optimistic that over time, the sellers and banks of some of these buildings will become a little more realistic as to what the building is worth,' said Leo Addimando, managing partner of Alterra Property Group in Philadelphia. 'There’s a lot of ground-up apartments being built in Philadelphia right now,' said Ashley DeLuca, who co-leads a new team at the law firm Ballard Spahr focused on distressed office buildings."

"'The federal government is going to have to step in and offer some really attractive financing programs for people to convert these buildings [like] loan programs at subsidized interest rates,' said Glenn Blumenfeld, principal with the tenant brokerage firm Tactix Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia. 'The government could offer a program with 3% interest rates, a 50-year loan amortization, and guarantee the loans and the developer would have to provide below market rate housing,' said Blumenfeld. 'You just can’t have these urban cores with all these rusting, hulking, office buildings decaying over the years.'"

Bisnow New York. "Nightingale Properties is facing foreclosure at yet another office building as a lender looks to take over the empty Wall Street building it co-owns with InterVest Capital Partners. The mezzanine lender on 111 Wall St. has initiated a foreclosure auction on the 1.2M SF building, enlisting JLL to run the proceeding, which is set for Sept. 19, GreenStreet reports. Oaktree Capital Management holds a mezzanine loan for just under $100M on the building and set the action in motion with plans to leverage its existing debt to take over the property."

"The foreclosure is the latest in a string of problems for Nightingale. The company and its CEO, Elie Schwartz, have been accused of misappropriating tens of millions raised through the crowdfunding platform CrowdStreet for office deals in Atlanta and Miami that never closed. An independent manager is investigating what happened to the money and put the entities created for the deals into bankruptcy July 14. CrowdStreet is also considering appointing an independent manager to take over the entity that controls 200 West Jackson Blvd., a 480K SF office tower in downtown Chicago for which Nightingale raised $25M on the platform to buy in 2022, Bisnow reported this week. Meanwhile, Nightingale's office property at 1500 Market St. in Philadelphia has been in receivership since April."

The Real Deal on California. "The lender for a blighted office building in West San Jose has seized the property after its second foreclosure following a failed attempt by Kochland to turn it into homes. Emerson Vista, a San Jose-based lender, assumed ownership of the two-story building at 826 North Winchester Boulevard after Kochland, an affiliate controlled by Kenneth Ryan Koch of Grass Valley, defaulted on a $505,000 loan, the San Jose Mercury News reported. The vacant two-story office building, covered with graffiti and surrounded by a chain-link fence, has cycled in and out of foreclosure for years. Since the start of the pandemic, the Winchester Professional Building has had three owners and faced two foreclosure proceedings."

"This year another Koch affiliate lost two properties to a foreclosure seizure in Los Gatos, according to the Mercury News. On Jan. 25, two Downtown Los Gatos commercial properties that Koch owns through a different affiliate were seized by a lender in a $7 million foreclosure auction."

The San Francisco Chronicle. "Truckee residents Ryan and Kaleigh O’Rear moved to the Lake Tahoe area in 2017, and soon decided to make it their permanent home. They focused on their ultimate goal of buying a house. In talking to couples who left Tahoe, all said finances were the ultimate driver. 'The underlying animosity in town had gotten pretty rough,' says Ryan, who left Truckee in June 2022. 'You’d accidentally brush someone on the sidewalk and they’d say, ‘Go back to the bay, asshole.’ We were really on edge by the time we left.' I couldn’t even afford to go to the farmers market,' Kaleigh says. 'It was like $20 for a flat of strawberries. Yeah, we miss it, but we just got pushed out.'"

"For Ryan, working at the Truckee Airport meant being faced with the extreme wealth of North Lake Tahoe’s fly-in homeowners on a near-daily basis. 'The excess on display every day was absurd,' he said. 'It was hard to be around when you and everyone you know is just trying to figure out how they’re going to make it and how they’re going to stay there. And then people are just flying in, buying houses in cash, and screaming at you because they had to pull their own luggage and were mildly inconvenienced.'"

"Ryan adds that overall, he liked his job at the airport. Most people were friendly, he liked his co-workers, and he says it used to be that it paid extremely well for seasonal work. But he started to feel like the economic and cultural changes in Truckee were permanent when they went from getting 10 to 20 applications for an open position to one or two. 'It’s not a ‘cool kid, ski club, trust fund’ job,' he said. 'It’s a ‘I need money f—king now’ job. And the people who want those kinds of jobs are leaving.'"

The Globe and Mail in Canada. "For B.C., particularly those in Vancouver, the burden of housing costs keeps climbing. New data show that one in five, or 20 per cent of borrowers in the city of Vancouver, are spending at least half their household income on shelter costs. In the University Endowment Lands, half of the mortgage holders there pay 50 per cent or more of their average total household incomes on shelter costs. The data arrive at the same time that insolvency firm MNP released its Consumer Debt Index that showed 52 per cent of British Columbians report that they are within $200 of not being able to pay their bills by month’s end. That was an eight-point increase since the last quarter, which is the biggest increase out of all the provinces."

"Long-time Toronto mortgage broker Ron Butler said the high number of borrowers in Vancouver and Toronto who are cash-strapped does not surprise him. He’s seeing borrowers who will have to sell their homes – a relatively small number, but they are there. 'There are people who utilized a HELOC [home equity line of credit] who have had rates go from 2.95 per cent to 7.7 per cent in 15 months and there is a direct correlation to payments, so those payments have more than doubled,' says Mr. Butler."

"Langley mortgage broker Alex McFadyen has some clients who are seeing their monthly payments increase by one or two thousand dollars. 'When this rate increase cycle started there was no indication we would be going up 3 or 4 per cent, let alone 4.5 per cent,' says Mr. McFadyen. 'Until the fall of last year or the winter, most people said this won’t have a meaningful impact on their lives. As of the June increase, I sensed a substantially higher amount of stress. I sensed the seams were starting to crack for some, and the realism of what was going on started to kick in for those folks with variable rate mortgages where the payment is locked in. I started to get more calls than ever from people suggesting they needed to refinance to set up an emergency fund.'"

"A contributing overall factor, says Mr. McFadyen, is that people just keep spending their money. According to the MNP report, half of British Columbians regret the amount of debt they’ve taken on in life. 'I would say the vast majority of people I meet don’t have much in the way of day-to-day savings, and most don’t have a good handle on their budget, and quite commonly I see people spending too much on things like vehicles and vacations and ancillary items and consumer goods. I don’t blame anyone or anything of that nature. It’s just a common occurrence.'"

From CBC News. "A Sudbury, Ont., mortgage broker and a car dealer say it's getting harder to make big purchases due to the Bank of Canada's latest interest rate hike. Trina Tallon, mortgage agent for Neighbourhood Dominion Lending Centres, said the current five per cent interest rate is unwelcome news for anyone waiting to spend. 'We never expected to be in this position,' she said. The latest increase also forces homeowners to put more money on interest and have little to no principle repayment, she added. 'Some folks have had to sell their ATVs or their quads and get rid of the loan in order to be able to afford the house that they want to get because that [increase] affects how much they can afford,' Tallon said. The latest increase also forces homeowners to put more money on interest and have little to no principle repayment, she added."

News.com.au in Australia. "Yet another Melbourne construction company has collapsed into liquidation, as casualties pile up in the sector. News.com.au can reveal that earlier this month, Narre Warren-based residential builder Kleev Homes Pty Ltd went into liquidation. An Interior designer working on a place next door to a home being built by Kleev Homes observed frustrated tradies visiting the premises earlier this month. 'I was over two weeks ago and trades were there trying to take back pipes and items in an effort to recoup some funds as the builder wasn’t answering calls,' they told news.com.au."

Daily Mail Australia. "A Gold Coast building firm has gone under, leaving over 500 apartment owners in limbo. GCB Constructions, a family-owned firm founded in the 1980s and based in Varsity Lakes, collapsed into administration on Wednesday, with staff losing their jobs. It comes a day after the Queensland Building and Construction Commission suspended its licence for 'failure to pay debts.' Local doctor James Ellingford is one of those affected. He purchased a three-bedroom corner apartment in the second tower of the $182m Marine Quarter project at Southport."

"He previously told the Gold Coast Bulletin he intended to rent it out before moving in and says he has a 'thousand questions. I'm very disappointed,' he said. 'It's a damn shame – it just means we're in a sort of limbo while we see what happens.' In May, the firm faced workers deserting sites after subcontractors claimed invoices were not being paid."