A report from WTOP News. "In 2020, travel was restricted by the pandemic, and many people could work from anywhere. For those who could afford it, a close-by second home on the Maryland and Delaware shores looked like a good investment for short-term rental income and as a work-from-anywhere remote option. As a result, inventory for sale in those vacation destinations, and others around the country, got extremely tight, sales began happening much more quickly and prices rose dramatically. Fast forward three years and the market has shifted. In May, listing service Bright MLS says almost one-third of homes that sold in the Mid-Atlantic were second-home and investment properties."

"'That short-term rental income was really high,' said Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at Bright MLS. 'People were traveling a little bit, but didn’t want to stay at hotels, so they were staying at this short-term rentals. We have seen revenue from these short-term rentals begin to decline.' The number of active listings in May in the Delmarva region was up 30.4% from a year ago. The months of supply based on current sales trend is up 72.5% from a year ago, according to Bright MLS data. The median price in the region in May was down 0.5% from a year earlier, the first year-over-year drop since May 2020."

Big Island Now. "The occupancy for Big Island vacation rentals in May was 43.5%, which is down 14.2% from a year ago and 27.8% lower than May 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. These statistics are according to the Hawaiʻi Vacation Rental Performance Report for May. There is a supply on the Big Island of 207,200 available vacation rental unit nights, but only 90,100 were used in May. The average daily rate was $228, which is 2.3% less than May 2022 but 48.7% more than May 2019. In May 2023, the total monthly supply of statewide vacation rentals was 827,700 unit nights (+20.2% vs. 2022, -10.9% vs. 2019) and monthly demand was 445,300 unit nights (-6.9% vs. 2022, -32.6% vs. 2019)."

The Union Tribune in California. "San Diego’s current law governing short-term rentals did not come easily or swiftly. Born out of compromise, it culminated a long and tortured history of hours-long, pitched City Council hearings that for years failed to yield any legislation. Other major cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles have taken very strict approaches in regulating their short-term rentals, and just last month Dallas banned them outright in most neighborhoods with single-family homes."

"Short-term rental operators wasted little time fighting back. Backed by the financial heft of Airbnb and Expedia, parent company of VRBO, they mounted a referendum drive in hopes of overturning the tough new regulations. Together, they spent more than $1 million on the signature-gathering effort. It worked. Just two months after reaffirming its vote to sharply limit vacation rentals, the council relented and repealed the new law."

"Two years would pass before Councilmember Jennifer Campbell, whose district includes the beach communities, would be able to broker a compromise, eventually enlisting the critical backing of the major home-sharing platforms, as well as the hotel workers union. Former Councilmember Barbara Bry, who led the push for the much stricter ordinance in 2018, said that precisely defining who can be a short-term rental host was a pivotal issue during the council deliberations."

"'I pointed out way back then the importance of defining the word 'host,' she said. 'Does 'host' mean each member of a family can be a host? One permit for the husband, one for the wife, and one for each child? Can an LLC be a host? This is an important story on many levels. You're sort of shining a light on how legislation gets passed when powerful lobbyists propose something. And then sometimes something gets passed with, perhaps unintended consequences. It's probably what Airbnb intended; it may not be what the council intended.'"

The Dallas Morning News in Texas. "Real estate agent Sharron Sadacca is one of thousands of Airbnb owners, rental operators, cleaners and other workers who rely on short-term rental properties, or STRs, as a vital source of income. They are in a state of flux with some scrambling to move operations and livelihoods out of state and others gearing up for what they say will be a court battle to halt the legislation. Sadacca still doesn’t know how and when the city’s ban will impact their business in Dallas where, the city says, there are about 1,000 registered STRs in single-family neighborhoods."

"'You can’t put (roughly) 1,700 entrepreneurs out of business in one fell swoop who are obeying the law, and not have anything to say about it,' said Lisa Sievers, an owner of two East Dallas properties, a pool house and a garage apartment, which she has rented on Airbnb since 2019. 'For the city to just kind of say, ‘Uh, sorry, y’all go fish now,’ it just strikes me as something that’s unfair and perhaps not very well thought out.'"

"Sievers, who also sits on the board of the Dallas Short Term Rental Alliance, a group that unsuccessfully tried to stop the ban in City Council, wants to use the legal challenges of Grapevine, Fort Worth and others as a model for a lawsuit in Dallas. The group has already retained the law firm Husch Blackwell on an 'advisory' status, Sievers said. 'There’s a lot of cities that have gone down this road because the basic bottom line is that bans don’t work,' Sievers said. 'I think the city of Dallas is going to be finding that out very shortly.'"

"In Dallas’ usually quiet Preston Hollow neighborhood, residents Cori Stethem and Sonya Hebert both described their horror when gunshots from an STR party rang out on their block. Stethem, five months pregnant with her first child, was in her future child’s nursery and on the phone with 911 when she heard the gunfire. Hebert, a mother of two, was hosting a sleepover for her 9-year-old and was in her children’s bedroom. During the late-night and early morning hours between June 4 and June 5, multiple Preston Hollow residents repeatedly called 911, they said, to report excessive noise, open drug use and trespassing from the STR party. But they say many of their calls to operators went unanswered. Instead, they received busy signals or had their calls dropped. By about 1 a.m., neighbors were no longer calling to report nuisances, but gunshots. 'It’s terrifying,' Stethem said. 'You call 911 when you have no other options.'"

From Bloomberg. "Ashford Hospitality Trust Inc. expects to return 19 hotels to lenders in cities including Las Vegas and Atlanta, declining to pour more cash into the properties, which are part of a $982 million mortgage pool that missed a repayment deadline in June. Keeping the hotels would have required a paydown of about $255 million to extend the financing and $80 million in capital expenditures through 2025, Dallas-based Ashford Trust said in a statement Friday. The equity in the properties is already negative, based on comparable sales and brokers opinion of value, according to the statement. 'At this time, it appears that the most likely outcome will be a consensual transfer of these hotels to the respective lenders,' the company said in the statement."

CBC News in Canada. "A bungalow sits on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Retallack Street in Regina's North Central neighbourhood. Plywood covers most of its windows. The mudroom roof is starting to cave in. The grass is unkempt, with two thin trees growing up from under the front steps. Ward 3 Coun. Andrew Stevens participated in a ride-along through his jurisdiction with members of the City of Regina's bylaw enforcement department last month. The officers brought him to this house. 'This house and many others might have been a nuisance for the community by every measure for months or years. Sadly, we're at a point where people would rather see houses demolished than have them turn into blight and nuisance properties that negatively affect the entire block,' Stevens told CBC News during an interview outside the house."

"Leah O'Malley and two other volunteers walked t"heir weekly beat on a rainy Friday evening, picking up needles in back alleys in the city's north end and offering sandwiches, snacks and ponchos to people on the street who need them. The trio passes multiple boarded-up, burned and abandoned buildings on their route. This time, O'Malley noted one that appeared newly occupied. 'This community has a problem with abandoned houses,' said O'Malley, board chair of White Pony Lodge, a non-profit based in the neighbourhood. O'Malley suggests the solution in North Central is not more low-income housing. 'The low-income housing that we already have here, a lot of it is empty,' she said."

The Telegraph in the UK. "Emma and Tom’s* north London house may as well be divided by duct tape. She gets the bedroom and ensuite; he has the spare room, upstairs bathroom and office. Emma has the run of the kitchen immediately after the children go to bed; Tom can cook dinner any time from 8.30pm. They’ve even rationed access to the television and sofa, with her getting peak lounging time from Wednesday to Saturday, and him from Sunday to Tuesday."

"The former couple decided to end their marriage last November. At any other period in recent history, the ink would already be dry on the papers and one of them would have moved out of the family home and bought or rented somewhere new. But their soaring mortgage repayments (they had to renegotiate in June) and stagnant wages, coupled with the price of raising two small children in the capital, means that their decision to divorce can’t be translated into a physical separation."

"'It has been the hardest year of my life,' says Emma. 'Deciding our marriage wasn’t working was difficult enough, but when we sat down and looked at our outgoings, we realised we couldn’t afford to run two households until we had saved some money. Having to live together and rehash it all whenever we argue is emotionally draining. I also really worry about the impact it’s having on the children.'"

"I spoke to six divorce lawyers – all of them said the remortgaging cliff that homeowners are about to fall off was making separation more complicated than it has been in decades; two-thirds told me that interest rates were now one of the first things new clients asked about. 'Look, it’s always a difficult time to separate, but this is going to turbocharge the divorce market,' says Harry Gates, the co-founder of a law firm that takes on both parties in a separation to ensure a quicker and cheaper split. 'The mortgage crisis is making it even harder to plan in cases where money is tight, as now every penny matters.'"

The Express. "A beach resort nicknamed the the 'North Korean Benidorm' is left rotting with empty hotels and overrun by homeless people. The resort was originally planned near the city of Wonsan, earning its name after communist North Korean leader Kim Jong-un reportedly sent a fact-finding mission to Spain's Costa Blanca back in 2017. Construction came to an end during the pandemic, leaving the resort abandoned and unfinished. Local residents have revealed the dire state of the site, previously used for missile tests, with reports of faeces-filled buildings and an influx of 'kkotjebi' — a North Korean term for homeless people."

"One individual told Daily NK, a South Korea-based newspaper, 'the buildings are no different from toilets, with bowel movements left behind by kkotjebi everywhere.' A source in Kangwon Province, which encompasses Wonsan, said: 'Buildings without doors have become gathering points for kkotjebi, and now they're full of human waste and soot from fires. And who's going to clean all that up? Ultimately, the people of Kangwon Province will be mobilised, and labour and money will be wasted on a project when nobody knows when it will open or if tourists will actually come.'"