It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Economists now project 2023 will mark the slowest year for home sales since 2008, when the housing bubble burst. This is the seventh week in a row that rates have risen, marking the longest stretch of consecutive increases since spring 2022, Freddie Mac said. 'Rates have risen two full percentage points in 2023 alone and, as we head into Halloween, the impacts may scare potential homebuyers,' Freddie Mac chief economist Sam Khater said in a statement. 'Purchase activity has slowed to a virtual standstill, affordability remains a significant hurdle for many and the only way to address it is lower rates and greater inventory.'"

"Housing market trends could offer an open door to potential buyers in Oklahoma. According to Angelena Harris, President-Elect for MLSOK, housing trends are changing and buyers shouldn't assumer what the market is experiencing now is the same at 2020. According to data from Redfin, Oklahoma prices are remaining stagnant. More homes are also being put up for sale but homes that are selling is down by about 17.7%. Harris said that forces sellers to cut deals with buyers. 'You have sellers who are a little freaked out that it's taking more than, you know, two weeks to a month to sell their home, so they are actually offering incentives,' she said."

"In the city that never sleeps, selling a home is proving to be really quite stressful, according to a recent StreetEasy survey conducted by The Harris Poll. New York City’s notoriously competitive real estate market is causing a wave of anxiety for sellers, with a staggering 35.7% of previously owned homes listed on StreetEasy in 2022 being removed from the market without finding a buyer. In 2022, 31.7% of co-op listings didn’t find a buyer, compared to 41.6% for condos citywide, and a staggering 50.1% for townhouses in Manhattan and 'brownstone Brooklyn' neighborhoods. Higher price points often translate to smaller pools of potential buyers. With fewer potential buyers in the market, more sellers are pulling their listings after struggling to secure a buyer."

"The Mt. Crested Butte town council on October 17 approved an agreement with Bywater Development to initiate the process for demolition of the unfinished Homestead affordable housing development. The town council selected Bywater Development to complete the community housing development in the Homestead Subdivision, and the town has agreed to move forward with demolishing all existing structures and foundations based on engineering and geotechnical assessments and evaluations conducted earlier this year. Construction of the 22-unit Homestead affordable housing development began in 2020 by Lance Windel of Homestead Housing LLC. In the fall of 2021, Windel went into default of his contracts with the Homestead unit owners, leaving the construction incomplete. 'The quality of the construction there was very poor. We didn’t feel that if we took anything that was existing there, that we couldn’t with a straight face hand that over to members of our community,' said town manager Carlos Velado. 'Let’s rip this horrible band aid off and start from scratch.'"

"The shores of Bear Lake are dotted with housing developments, condos and restaurants that cater to the roughly one million tourists who visit the turquoise-blue oasis each summer. But just behind that up-and-running front of Water’s Edge is a half-finished condo building with an exterior of exposed plywood and tattered house wrap. The unfinished building is a far cry from the expansive vacation units and glitzy amenities — including a hotel, indoor water park, valet boat service and an outdoor concert stage — promised in the resort’s renderings. And now, the Securities and Exchange Commission is accusing developer Utah Regional Investment Fund, led by Christofer Shurian, of fraud — pointing to the wide gap between what Water’s Edge is today and what investors and the U.S. government were promised it would be by now."

"According to the filing, Shurian told 36 foreign investors, all Chinese nationals, that their $500,000 investments would directly fund the resort’s construction, and that the project would be completed by 2017. The investors expected to reap profits — and a fast track to permanent residency in the United States, the SEC said, under an investment incentive program that the federal government offers with businesses in rural areas. Guests have historically only visited in the warmer months, leading many shops to close up until spring. Eighty percent of all the residences in Garden City are seasonal homes, according to the same study. 'When fall hits, [Garden City] just turns into a ghost town,' Shurian said. 'The first couple of times I came up here in the winter, you couldn’t get a meal.'"

"The indicted business partner of radio host DJ Envy made his first public comments since being accused by federal agents, accused of running a multimillion-dollar Ponzi-type scheme. Cesar Pina had been released on $1 million dollar bond with electronic monitoring after pleading not guilty to federal charges of bilking investors out of millions of dollars in the real estate venture. On Wednesday, he went on a several-minute YouTube ramble and talked about DJ Envy — a move that has just sparked more controversy. 'They call me Cesar Madoff, it’s crazy,' Pina said. Cesar’s response infuriated many investors — including Andre Ransome, who bought in for $200,000. He is suing Pina, just one of several lawsuits that have been filed against both Cesar and Envy. 'Give people back their money and stop playing with people’s lives,' said Ransome."

"An investment group that referred to itself as a 'person you can trust' has allegedly been perpetrating fraud targeting Dallas-Fort Worth’s Indian American community. Nanban Ventures LLC, a firm comprising three Frisco men, has raised nearly $130 million from hundreds of investors since April 2021, saying it was investing in technology and real estate. But 'in classic Ponzi fashion,' Nanban allegedly used investors’ money to make fake distribution payments to other investors and siphoned off millions of dollars for themselves, as revealed in a recent complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Dallas Morning News reported. 'The defendants used the ‘Nanban’ branding, a word that means ‘friend,’ when raising nearly $130 million from investors of mostly Indian descent,' Eric Werner, director of the SEC’s Fort Worth regional office, told the outlet. 'However, the defendants have been the furthest thing from ‘friends’ to their investors, raising money and paying false returns on a foundation of lies.'"

"Recent data from Statistics Canada revealed that as of 2021, 43 per cent of condo apartments and between 14 and 21 per cent of houses in Ontario were owned by investors. In the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) alone, investors owned 33 per cent of condo apartments and between nine and 16 per cent of all houses. Mortgage expert Ron Butler from Butler Mortgage in Etobicoke said that 2021 represented the peak of investor ownership and pointed to persistently low interest rates up until early 2022 as the main culprit. '(Investor involvement) was constantly growing all the way up to 2021. That was the peak year when mortgage interest rates were at their very lowest point. They were ridiculously low. That really favoured investors,' Butler said. 'I suggest today that investors are buying zero (properties) in 2023. Because in 2023, interest rates don’t allow them to make any money on any purchase.'"

"A property business set up by Exeter City Council to create affordable housing is to be wound down after making huge losses. Exeter City Living (ECL) owes the local authority more than £10 million and is the latest in a succession of council-owned housing companies to hit trouble. All but a handful of its assets will now be sold, but that could still leave the city millions of pounds out of pocket. Elsewhere, Mid Devon’s 3Rivers Development is being wound up after racking up debts of £21 million and Torbay Council has cut back the activities of its TorVista Homes after that hit trouble too. Soaring costs and rising inflation are blamed for the demise of the companies."

"Last week, the Inspector General of Government (IGG) Betty Kamya Turwomwe presided over a fiery meeting between condo owners and property developers. The IGG convened the meeting after several complaints reached her office from aggrieved home owners seeking justice for allegedly getting shortchanged by condominium developers. Isaac Mutenyo, the chairman of Engineers Registration Board, doubts whether regulators are doing their job, adding that when he was constructing a property in Kira, not a single regulator came to supervise the works. The other source of problems, according to his expertise, is the developers are using quack engineers. 'Our responsibility as an engineering body is to punish any engineer that is employed and does not follow standards. If an engineer does things against standards, you are supposed to come to us and we rectify the issue. But I have not heard of anybody coming to complain to us over an engineer that has done shoddy work. I strongly believe some of these developers are employing untrained people,' he stated."

"A year on from the devastating floods that engulfed a Melbourne suburb just eight kilometres from the CBD, the chairwoman of a local residents’ group has accused the local council of 'mongrel behaviour.' The floods, which affected more than 500 properties on October 14, 2022, shocked Melbourne. Madeleine Serle, of the Maribyrnong Community Recovery Committee, whose own property was affected by the floods, described the recovery process as 'an exhausting nightmare.' The economic stress is causing some residents to 'give up' and sell their properties at a loss. Properties that may previously have fetched $1 million are selling for $750,000. 'They’re just taking huge losses,' she said, adding that others also want to sell, but 'they can’t necessarily afford it.'"

"Tran Phuong, an investor in Hanoi, noted that there have been many offers to sell villas and condotels in famous tourism cities, including Da Nang, Nha Trang, Phu Quoc and Quang Ninh. The villas priced at tens of billions dong are now offered with a discount of VND2-3 billion. Phuong is eyeing condotels with quoted prices of VND2-4 billion. The condotel owners say that they have to sell at a loss of hundreds of millions of dong. Nguyen Vu Cao, CEO of Van Khang Phat, a major realtor, said the signs of the resort real estate market recovery are still weak. 'The market segment now is unattractive to investors. The market has very few transactions,' he said."

"Previously, the cash flow in the market was strong and it was easy to seek financial sources, so many investors injected money into resort real estate. However, after realizing that profits from condotel leasing were not as high as expected, the capital flow changed direction. 'Investors will not make heavy investments in resort real estate,' Cao said. The resort real estate prices in Da Nang, Nha Trang, Ha Long (Quang Ninh), Phu Quoc and Quy Nhon are all too high. The selling prices have been ‘inflated’ by 5-6 times. In some areas, the offered prices are 10 times higher than that of 10 years ago. A report by Savills Hotels showed that the average room occupancy rate in Vietnam hovered around 40 percent in the first eight months."

"A rough year for Vietnam's real estate sector has seen developers miss interest payments on debt, amid a credit crunch spurred by ill-timed government measures, although spillover risk has been limited. The sector was the worst performer last month on the falling Ho Chi Minh City stock exchange, with a drop of nearly 16% on the month, says key Vietnam investor Dragon Capital. That capped two years of turmoil in developers' shares that spread last year to corporate bonds, hitting project development and leaving ghost blocks of high-end property."

"Buildings stand empty with interiors unfinished in developer Sun Group's 'Mediterranean town' on the southern island of Phu Quoc, while the skeletons of incomplete high-rises flank shiny towers in Hanoi built by another developer, Sunshine. And the pressure is mounting, with real-estate bonds of about $6 billion set to mature each this year and the next, nearly three times more than in 2022. Analysts blame the worst troubles on a long-running graft campaign that authorities stepped up at the end of last year. They see the Oct. 2022 arrest over financial fraud of Truong My Lan, chairwoman of Van Thinh Phat Holdings Group, as a turning-point after which confidence dropped. The arrest followed tougher rules on transparency and private placement of corporate bonds adopted that September, and coinciding with an economic slowdown, so that authorities were forced to suspend them a few months later, as the market froze."