A report from WDSU in Louisiana. "According to the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors, houses are sitting on the market longer and sales are down 24 percent compared to this time last year. Real estate broker Samantha Bush has been in the industry for more than 15 years. She says this is the first time it's been this slow because of insurance. 'It has slowed down tremendously. I have never seen it this slow before,' said Bush."

The Real Deal. "A year after completing Villa Valencia in Coral Gables, Location Ventures failed to secure a final certificate of occupancy for the 13-story boutique condominium. And since last month, 10 contractors, including project manager Winmar Construction, have filed 23 construction liens totaling nearly $7 million against the building’s development entity, records show. It’s the latest batch of trouble for the beleaguered Coral Gables-based development firm previously led by Rishi Kapoor, a once rising star in South Florida’s real estate scene who’s now a target of local and federal investigations examining his management of Location Ventures."

"Coral Gables Commissioner Ariel Fernandez told The Real Deal he received calls from Villa Valencia unit owners who are concerned the building still doesn’t have a final certificate of occupancy. 'It’s really an unfortunate situation,' Fernandez said. 'The developer is nowhere in sight to take care of this. It puts the city in a tough spot to get this done.'"

The Wall Street Journal. "A penthouse at One57 on New York’s Billionaires’ Row has gone into contract after seeing its price slashed to $34 million, about $13 million less than its 2015 sale price, according to listings website StreetEasy. The deal, which hasn’t yet closed, is evidence of how much One57’s fortunes have fallen since 2011, when it set record prices for the city and drew billionaire buyers including hedge-fund titan Bill Ackman and tech entrepreneur Michael Dell."

"When the unit traded in 2015, it sold for $47.37 million to a company tied to Chinese conglomerate HNA, records show. It was one of several units linked to HNA in the building. When it subsequently sold again in 2020, with HNA facing financial difficulties, the price was just $28 million, records show. This time, the 88th-floor condo unit was listed for $45 million in June 2022, but saw its price lowered several times, according to StreetEasy. Once one of the most aggressively acquisitive companies in China, HNA was effectively taken over by the Hainan provincial government after mounting debts forced it to abandon its global ambitions. Another company tied to HNA took a loss when it sold a unit at One57 in 2021 for $31.9 million to 'Shark Tank' star Robert Herjavec, six years after buying it for $47.37 million."

The New York Post on California. "The sold-out planned 'doom loop' tour of drug-infested San Francisco was canceled, and community leaders tried to hold a 'positive walk' instead — only to still stroll past addicts getting high and homeless camps. Curious tourists and locals had shelled out $30 a pop on Eventbrite for a weekend tour promising an up-close-and-personal experience with San Francisco, 'the model of urban decay' — complete with walks past its 'open-air drug markets and vacant office and retail spaces.' But the tour’s guide, only listed as 'SF Anonymous Insider,' failed to show at Saturday’s event, claiming he was afraid to carry it out because of all the controversy around it."

"Dany Vallerand said she initially wanted to take the advertised 'doom loop' tour because she usually didn’t feel comfortable going through the area on her own. She noted the economic downtown of San Francisco has affected many residents such as herself, as flagship businesses have left the area and property value going down. Vallerand said she recently sold her condo $150,000 below her asking price. 'It is very hard to see it happening here,' she said."

Bisnow Washington DC. "Bethesda-based development firm Washington Property Co. has defaulted on its loan tied to a 14-story Silver Spring office building, the latest in a series of distressed situations in the region's office market. The developer failed to pay off its $35M loan on the building ahead of a July 11 maturity date, and the CMBS loan was then transferred to special servicing and a letter of default sent to the borrower, according to servicer commentary reported by financial research firm Morningstar Credit. The loan is backed by the 242K SF Silver Spring Plaza office building at 8757 Georgia Ave., which was built in 1971. The building is operating at 73% occupancy, while cash flow has fallen 'well short' of underwriting levels, according to Morningstar Credit Head of CRE Analytics David Putro."

"Adding to the concern, the special servicer’s report says the building’s largest tenant, Social & Scientific Systems, a subsidiary of DLH Holdings Corp., has 'gone dark,' meaning it has ceased operations in the building despite continuing to pay its rent. S3 occupies 67K SF, or 27.56% of the building’s leasable area, and has a lease through 2031. Regardless of the largest tenant, the building's overall occupancy level would have been enough to impede refinancing even in a normal lending environment, Putro said. 'With cash flow at this level for several years, reported occupancy at 73% and an additional 28% that has gone dark, this loan had little chance of refinancing,' Putro told Bisnow."

The Toronto Star in Canada. "Cracks are starting to show in Toronto’s preconstruction housing market, as financial pressures not only stall future projects but some industry experts are also seeing an uptick in purchasers putting their properties up for sale, with the most distressed cases coming from buyers of lowrise and freehold homes in the suburbs. They warn it could be just the beginning, as preconstruction homebuyers who put down a deposit during the pandemic find their full payment coming due in a drastically changed economic and interest rate climate. 'The assignment market is becoming a hope and a prayer for people who are in desperate states,' said real estate lawyer Mark Morris. 'If you don’t have the ability to close you will sell at any price.'"

From ABC News. "Australians are defaulting on their home loans at growing rates as the number of borrowers at risk of mortgage stress peaks at levels not seen since 2008, when the global financial crisis hit. This year, hundreds of thousands of households have rolled off historically low interest rates fixed during the pandemic and another 450,000 home loans will expire next year. Cody Briggs and his partner Monique McHale started building their dream home in Perth's south-eastern suburbs in 2020. But construction delays, cost blowouts and the tight rental market forced the couple to buy another home before Monique gave birth to their first child. The couple are now spending 70 per cent of their income on their home loans, and Monique hasn't been able to work while caring for their son."

"'I am pretty stressed, I try not to think about it,' he said. 'It's better to be ignorant than face the reality that we might not make the next progress payment, we might end up having to sell this home.'"

South China Morning Post. "China Evergrande Group plunged in Hong Kong when trading resumed after a 17-month trading suspension, lopping off US$2.4 billion from its market value as investors rushed for the exit amid a debt restructuring by the world’s most indebted property developer. Evergrande’s shares tumbled 87 per cent to 22 HK cents as soon as trading commenced, versus the pre-suspension price of HK$1.65 on March 21 last year. The slump erased HK$18.9 billion (US$2.4 billion) from its capitalisation. Its new auditor Prism Hong Kong and Shanghai also said that it was unable to obtain sufficient evidence to prove Evergrande’s ability to continue as a going concern, as the forecast was based on certain assumptions 'that involve significant uncertainties.'"

The Telegraph. "It is not just growing superpower rivalry, or China’s malign influence on Western jobs and capabilities, we need to be concerned about. It is also Chinese triumphalism. That sense of Chinese superiority can be dated to the financial crisis 15 years ago, when Wang Qishan, then China’s finance minister, remarked to his opposite number in the US, Hank Paulson: 'You were my teacher. But now I am in my teacher’s domain, and look at your system, Hank. We aren’t sure we should be learning from you any more.' Mr Wang’s wonderfully understated observation soon transmogrified under President Xi Jinping into – and here I’m offering a caricature – 'definitely not learning from you any more, because our system of governance and economic management is self-evidently far superior to yours.'"

"During the early days of the pandemic, this became an almost unchallenged narrative, with China setting the template for how governments should respond in the face of a potentially deadly contagion. We all followed China’s lead, with the positions of teacher and pupil unambiguously reversed. China became the gold standard in how to deal with a pandemic; a combination of extreme lockdown – tailor-made for autocratic government, but anathema to freedom-loving democracy – and mass testing proved highly effective in containing the disease, and was soon being trumpeted by President Xi as more evidence of Chinese pre-eminence."

"Here in Britain we seem to have had the worst of all possible worlds; at vast economic and social cost, we were eventually persuaded to follow China into government imposed lockdown, but to arguably little effect.
As it turned out, the nation was hopelessly unprepared for a threat of this magnitude; the medical establishment was all over the place on decisively gripping the situation. Much the same was true of the rest of the democratised world. Other than South Korea and Taiwan, more or less everyone seems to have got it badly wrong."

"Yet in terms of the monetary cost, Britain seemed to come out of it worst of all. If Xi had concocted a dastardly plan to bring down the West, he could scarcely have dreamt up anything quite as effective. Lockdown was pure poison for our largely service based advanced economies. Yet the tables soon turned, and in the event, closing down the economy to fight Covid has proved just as economically disastrous for China as it was to America and Europe, and the way things look right now, possibly more so."

"As in the West, the induced sleep of lockdown has acted as a petri-dish for all the economy’s underlying weaknesses. When finally forced by growing popular unrest to abandon the zero-Covid policy, China failed to come bouncing back as expected, and is now threatened with a tsunami of bankruptcies, deflation, and as demand plummets, oversupply in everything from housing to car production. Like all such growth spurts, it was built on a Ponzi-style inverted pyramid of rising indebtedness. Now that the credit bubble is bursting, you wonder for how much longer the charade can be kept going by merely applying more of the same. Some may say good; China is finally getting its comeuppance."