A report from New Hampshire Public Radio. "In New Hampshire, the rate of foreclosure filings on properties has risen 149.72 percent from mid-year 2021 to mid-year 2023, according to ATTOM. Most of that increase has happened in the last year. Because many home loans in the United States are connected to a government program, the lifting of the moratorium last year affected many borrowers, said Stephanie Bray, an attorney for New Hampshire Legal Assistance and the director of the organization’s Foreclosure Relief Project. 'The knowledge was always there that the piper would have to be paid eventually,' Bray said, speaking on the end of the government-led freeze."

Bisnow South Florida. "The collapse of Champlain Tower South in Surfside, Florida, in June 2021 killed 98 people and reverberated across the state’s coastal communities. Some owners looked for a way out and, in the months that followed, developers began negotiations to acquire at least eight condo buildings. But as the cost of acquisitions, insurance and development skyrocketed in the last year, potential buyers have become less interested in negotiating with dozens or hundreds of individual owners. Not even Miami’s beachfront property is immune to the slowdown in capital markets and development driven by increased costs at every stage of development. 'It paused the development just because of the economics, between the cost of capital going up, the cost of insurance doubling and tripling year-over-year, and then the cost of construction also going up,' said Jaime Sturgis, the CEO of Native Realty who has worked on several buyouts. 'It's very difficult to pencil around on multifamily construction right now.'"

"Florida law didn't previously require condos to conduct reserve studies, and associations were previously allowed to waive or reduce reserve contributions through a membership vote. 'Unit owners often exercised this ill-advised option to keep assessments as low as possible and/or to avoid paying for major components scheduled to be repaired or replaced, which they contemplated would be after the sale of their units,' Kevin Koushel, an attorney at Blizin Sumberg, wrote in an analysis of the law. 'The new legislation is truly a ‘time to pay the piper’ moment for older condominiums where skipping a reserve study, and/or waiving or reducing reserves has been an annual tradition,' Koushel wrote."

Community Impact in Texas. "Home prices in San Marcos, Buda and Kyle have largely plateaued in recent months from their meteoric ascent since prior to the pandemic. From May 2020-May 2022, the median home price across Hays County rose from $265,900 to $470,000, or nearly 77%. The most recent data from the Realtors association shows it fell in May 2023 to $400,000."

The Dallas Morning News in Texas. "With businesses bailing out of millions of square feet of office space since the pandemic, building vacancies in Dallas-Fort Worth have risen to the highest point in more than 20 years. At midyear, almost 50 million square feet of D-FW office space was vacant. Throw in millions more square feet of sublease office space on the market and vacancy rates are headed toward 27%. The last time local office vacancies were so high was in the dot com era bubble and telecom sector shakeout of more than 20 years ago. 'Depending on how you slice the numbers, we are back to the bad old days of the 1990s,' said Walter Bialas, senior analyst with commercial property firm Avison Young. 'It’s hard to say where this is going to shake out. I’d like to see more green shoots than I’m seeing.' The growing glut of office space isn’t just a D-FW problem. Major cities across the country are struggling to figure out what to do with millions of square feet of empty buildings."

Cascadia Daily in Washington. "Hardest hit in this decade of hybrid work were the downtown Bellingham and the Barkley Village areas, according to Ryan A. Martin, broker at Pacific Continental Realty. Asking prices for office space dropped as availability rose. Martin is quick to point out that the decline in office space demand doesn’t portend a Seattle-like collapse — a different report cited a 24% Seattle vacancy rate in the second quarter. The short version of the state of home sales in Whatcom and Skagit counties as 2023’s first half came to a close: sagging but stubborn median prices, fewer sold and a continuing lack of inventory. Whatcom County had a median sales price of $600,000, according to a Q2 report issued by Peter Ahn, co-owner of The Muljat Group in Bellingham. That’s down 7.6% from a year earlier. The number of homes sold was down 18.3%. Skagit County saw a similar pattern. The two brokers’ analyses noted a second-quarter median price in Bellingham of $712,000, down 9.3% from a year earlier."

The Coast News in California. "Home values in North County San Diego fell over the past year, according to a new report from SmartAsset. Between May 2022 and May 2023, Carlsbad saw a 3.45% drop in housing prices, followed by Vista (3.55%), Oceanside (3.81%), Escondido (4.75%) and San Marcos (5.74%), the report shows. But home values have fallen in cities across the Golden State and some places far more dramatically than North County, such as the 12.82% drop in Palo Alto. While Carlsbad had the largest drop in home prices, the city’s average listing is nearly $500,000 more than in San Marcos. While the report only studied cities with a population of more than 65,000, SmartAsset did review smaller coastal cities like Del Mar, Encinitas and Solana Beach, each experiencing a small decline in home values since last year."

The Real Deal on California. "Lenders are poised to foreclose on a 20-story office tower in San Francisco’s Financial District owned by an affiliate of WeWork, which occupies half the building. A special servicer has sued the New York-based WeWork Capital Advisors to foreclose on 600 California Street after the co-working firm fell behind on a $240 million loan, the San Francisco Business Times reported. A special servicer based in New York sued the co-working company’s investment arm that owns stakes in buildings where WeWork leases offices. WeWork leases more than 186,000 square feet at the 359,000-square-foot building, but stopped paying rent in March, resulting in a default, according to disclosures to bond investors affiliated with the commercial mortgage-backed securities loan filed last month."

"The potential foreclosure is the latest Downtown San Francisco default as owners, facing higher interest rates and office vacancies in the era of remote work, fail to make payments as loans mature. Last month, Swift Real Estate Partners defaulted on a $62.3 million loan tied to an eight-story building at 55 New Montgomery Street. New York-based Columbia Property Trust defaulted on a $1.7 billion loan backed by a seven-building portfolio, including two office buildings at 650 California Street and 201 California Street. Nearly $2 billion in loans are coming due this year for office buildings in the city, followed by nearly another $2 billion next year, signaling other possible defaults, according to Trepp."

From Fortune. "Surging interest rates and the rise of remote work have combined to create a nightmare scenario for commercial real estate investors. Just ask Barry Sternlicht, CEO of Starwood Capital Group, a real estate investment firm with $115 billion in assets under management. 'There’s a hurricane over real estate right now,' the billionaire investor told ​​David Rubenstein, co-founder of The Carlyle Group, in an interview for Bloomberg Wealth. 'We’re in a category 5 hurricane, and it’s sort of a black cloud hovering over the entire industry until we get some relief or some understanding of what the Fed is going to do over the long term.'"

"Two of Starwood’s biggest corporate landlord peers, Blackstone and Brookfield Asset Management, have stopped making payments on some offices with high vacancy rates amid the work-from-home trend, Bloomberg reported. Sternlicht argued this is evidence the office sector will be split into haves and have-nots in the coming years—and many have-nots may go out of business. 'The nice buildings will stay rented and my guess is at pretty good rates. And the B and C stuff is going to be —maybe fields of grain or something. It’ll be very pretty. We’ll have all these little mid-block parks in New York City because there won’t be anything else to do with those buildings,' he said."

"In 1991, he started Starwood Capital Group to buy apartment buildings from the Resolution Trust Corporation, an entity made by the federal government to liquidate the assets of the failed banks from the S&L crisis. Now, Sternlicht believes that if more banks fail, there could be a 'second RTC,' which means he may be able to wind back the clock to when he was just 31, starting Starwood, and buy up some distressed assets on sale. 'They [the failed banks] will have to sell,' he said, calling it 'a great opportunity.'"

The Globe and Mail. "If you’re in Canada’s major urban centres, 'affordable' housing can seem an impossibility, but according to the Canadian Real Estate Association there are still options in almost every province that are cheaper than they were last year. In British Columbia, the Chilliwack area on the eastern end of the Fraser Valley, prices in May were down 13.5 per cent from last year. Edmonton remains one of the cheapest and slowest-growing price environments among large cities in the country, with a HPI benchmark price of $362,400. Edmonton is up only 8.5 per cent from three years ago but is still down 8.8 per cent from one year ago."

"Some of the steepest price drop-offs in the country have been seen in rural and recreational communities in Ontario such as Grey-Bruce-Owen Sound, neighbouring Huron-Perth, the Niagara Region and Simcoe County. All of those areas have prices that are about 15 per cent off the peaks of a year ago but still see a benchmark price typically between about $500,000 and just less than $700,000. The two areas that are even further off the mark are Peterborough and the Kawarthas and the Windsor-Essex corridor where the benchmark price is down 17.6 per cent and 17.2 per cent respectively, the slowest regional recoveries in the country. Between the two, Windsor has the cheaper benchmark price of $545,700."

Daily Mail in the UK. "Many home hunters are likely to try and haggle a property under asking price amid the apparent slowdown across the housing market. More than two-fifths of sellers are now accepting offers that are more than 5 per cent below the asking price, according to Zoopla. This is the highest proportion recorded since 2018. Duncan Ley of Cornwall based estate agency, Humberts, said: 'Whilst some vendors don't want to accept that we are no longer in the market frenzy of Covid, most are aware that we are in a softening market now. Cornwall obviously boomed during the pandemic and that level of activity was never going to continue, so it's no surprise that properties aren't selling for 20 per cent over the asking price like they were a couple of years ago. 'Sellers don't need to panic though. We're finding it's the correctly priced homes that are selling quickly and receiving the full asking price or slightly under. Where it can go horribly wrong is if a house is overpriced. That is when you will see lots of price reductions.'"

The Daily Telegraph in Australia. "A gutted Inner West home that needs $1m+ in repair work has sold for a massive loss prior to auction. A Drummoyne home with issues arising from the building slab in its 2020 extension sold at an undisclosed price on auction eve through BresicWhitney. The gutted Bowman St offering had a $2.7m price guide for Saturday’s auction, up on its initial $2.5m guidance. It had, however, cost $4.11m in June 2021, with Macquarie Group financing, when the four-bedroom, three-bathroom house was marketed by BresicWhitney as having a 'well-executed architect vision.' It was a flip after the 1910 house on 550sq m was bought in 2019 for $1.63m. BresicWhitney was 'supporting' the owner 'given the stressful nature of the situation,' BW advised after local speculation they were selling it for no commission."