A report from the Miami Herald. "Florida lawmakers made a choice after the 2021 Surfside building collapse: to protect human life instead of continuing to allow condominiums to defer important maintenance that could put more people at risk. The unintended result is that some condo dwellers might be in for a sticker shock. State law now bans condo associations from waiving financial reserves for building maintenance, a common practice among associations. By January 2025, they will have to conduct “structural integrity reserve studies” to determine how much money must be set aside to complete structural repairs such as roofs, load-bearing walls and fire-protection systems."

"These new requirements, along with the skyrocketing costs of property insurance, could create a perfect storm and make condo living unaffordable for many Floridians. Officials in South Florida are sounding the alarm, saying that foreclosures will start to happen. That was a topic of concern during a recent Broward County legislative delegation meeting. Hit the hardest will be residents of buildings that have not kept reserves. As condo lawyer Ryan Poliakoff told the Herald Editorial Board, many condos 'were living off borrowed money.' Costly choices made 10, 15, 20 years ago to waive a rainy-day fund will now come due, and those picking up the tab might not even be aware of it unless they have kept up with their association."

Yahoo Finance. "Roughly 53,000 US home purchase agreements fell through in September, according to Redfin, equal to 16.3% of homes that went under contract that month. That’s the highest percentage of canceled contracts since October 2022 when mortgage rates surpassed 7% for the first time in two decades. The share is also up from 15.2% a month earlier and 15.8% a year earlier. Pandemic boomtowns where home prices skyrocketed due to the influx of remote workers were hit the hardest with buyers with cold feet, Redfin noted, with some areas in Florida seeing contract cancellation rates over 20%."

"Among the 50 most populous metros analyzed by Redfin, Atlanta saw the most pending sales fall out of contract in September. Some 24.4% of contracts were canceled in the area that month, up from 23.6% in August – but slightly down from 27.1% a year earlier. Metros in Florida rounded up the top five cities with the highest shares of cancellations, with Jacksonville seeing 24% of contracts fall through in September, followed by Orlando (23.6%), Tampa (22.7%), and Fort Lauderdale (22%). 'Affordability is a big issue,' Jeffrey Ruben, president of WSFS Mortgage, told Yahoo Finance. 'The interest rate environment is definitely creating constraints in our industry. It’s become a depressed kind of housing market.'"

Deseret News in Utah. "Even though the housing market is in the midst of a correction thanks to the rapid rise of mortgage rates that began in mid-2022, U.S. home prices are still overvalued — and some local markets are more overvalued than others. That's according to a new analysis from Moody's Analytics, which estimates national median home prices are about 15.7% over their fundamental value. Boise was also among the first to post a year-over-year home value decline in Zillow's Home Value Index, down 1.2% in August 2022. More recently, Boise was down over 7% year over year, according to Zillow data through Sept. 30."

"Utah, like Idaho, was also hit hard by the pandemic housing rush and saw some of the biggest home price declines as interest rates rose. In August, after six straight months of growth, home prices in most of Utah's Wasatch Front counties tipped down. In Salt Lake County, the median price of all home types fell to $520,000 that month, a nearly 10% drop from a year ago and nearly 2% down from July, according to the Salt Lake Board of Realtors. To put those declines in perspective, however, Utah's home prices surged by 72% over the past five years, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. In the two-year period from 2020 to 2022 alone, the median sales price of a home in Utah rose almost 50%, up from $336,300 in February of 2020 to $500,000 the same month in 2022, according to estimates from the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute."

Willamette Week in Oregon. "Portland-based Sortis Holdings is not a household name. But many of the companies Sortis controls are recognizable, at least to Portlanders who like trendy restaurants, good coffee, stylish hotels and haircuts with a complimentary beer. For the past three years, Sortis executive chairman Paul Brenneke has assembled a number of consumer-facing businesses as the region recovers from the pandemic. But a flurry of recent lawsuits, including a wrongful termination claim by a former senior executive and demands from unpaid creditors, suggests Sortis’ plan may not be working."

"Then, on Nov. 3, the Portland Business Journal reported that Sortis’ acquisition of the boutique hotel chain Ace Group International, announced in January, had failed after litigation with the seller. Sortis told the Business Journal that it was laying off 30 employees as a result but would continue stronger than ever. Kurt Huffman, founder of ChefStable, a Portland company that has worked with chefs to develop dozens of local restaurants, says he has found Sortis’ game plan increasingly hard to follow. 'I kind of understood the strategy of buying top-flight hospitality businesses at a discount,' Huffman says. 'It became very confusing when they acquired a bunch of coffee chains, hotels and barbershops—that’s when they lost me.'"

From CalMatters. "The numbers of Californians living in poverty or near-poverty edged upward this year as federal pandemic programs expired, according to a new survey by the Public Policy Institute of California and Stanford University’s Center on Poverty and Inequality. Currently, 13.2% of California’s nearly 40 million residents live in families which fall below the $39,000 annual income mark deemed the minimum for a family of four to meet its needs. The rate climbs to 31.1% if those in near-poverty (incomes up to $60,000) are included. The California Poverty Measure, or CPM, is derived from the federal Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, or SPM, which was devised to cure the deficiencies of the official poverty rate, a one-size-fits-all data point that measures just some income but is not adjusted for the cost of living."

"Although the methodology varies a bit, the Census Bureau’s SPM rate for California, 13.2%, is identical to the California measure rate and is the highest of any state. Within California, Los Angeles County has the highest CPM rate at 15.5%, followed by San Diego County at 15%. While California’s SPM rate is the nation’s highest because of its costs of living vis-à-vis its income levels, Los Angeles and San Diego rates are the state’s highest because their housing costs outstrip incomes for their many low-income service workers and their families.So there are the numbers. California has the nation’s highest functional poverty rate and Los Angeles County, which has about a quarter of the state’s population, leads the state."

CTV News in Canada. "A little more than two weeks have passed since the B.C. government rolled out proposed legislation to crack down on short-term rentals in B.C. in an effort to correct the ongoing housing crisis. Now the dust has begun to settle and the impact of that legislation is beginning to come to light. Three and a half years ago Steve Gordon and his wife, Sharon, retired. The couple sold their home in Esquimalt and bought two condos – one in Squamish and a small unit in the Janion building in downtown Victoria. They call themselves collateral damage of the province's crackdown on short-term rentals. 'We saw this and we bought it knowing that we can Airbnb it,' said Steve. 'We’ve done everything legally and we actually paid a premium because of that. You know what? We have been bullied.'"

"They don’t want to sell, nor do they want to rent the unit on a long-term basis because that defeats their reason for buying the studio apartment in the first place. 'The property value definitely has gone down,' said Steve. 'I’m seeing huge attrition of my clientele,' said Nancy Paine, CEO SpaceHost, a short-term rental management company in Victoria. Paine says after the province's announcement a little more than two weeks ago, she immediately lost 30 per cent of her business. 'Twenty per cent of my clients are listing on MLS right now,' said Paine. Others have decided to list later and 43 per cent of her clients are in a holding pattern, trying to decide what to do by the deadline of May 1. That is when the proposed legislation will kick in. 'I don’t think my business will exist in January or certainly by May 1,' said Paine."

The Canadian Press. "Greater Toronto home sales fell 5.8 per cent last month compared with October 2022, with sales of townhouses recording the biggest decline. New listings surged 38 per cent to 14,397 in October compared with 10,433 in October 2022, which had marked a 12-year low. Toronto realtor Vy Ngo said the market is currently as slow as she’s ever experienced in her career while buyers try to wait out the high interest rate environment. 'I thought this time last year, it was really bad. But this period we’re in right now is even more than a year ago,' said Ngo, a sales representative with Big City Realty Inc. Brokerage. 'Sales are really low because buyers just can’t afford to qualify for a mortgage.'"

From Metro in the UK. "The day before she was due to exchange contracts, the people buying Katharine Storr’s family home slashed their offer by £30,000. ‘They were bringing up all kinds of things which were in the survey, but weren’t issues at all,’ said the mum, 38, who lives in Tooting with her husband Matt and their kids. ‘They had us over a barrel and knew it as we have three children and were moving house for schools.’"

"Like many selling a property in the current market, Katharine had been gazundered – when a buyer reduces their offer at a late stage of negotiations to pressure the seller into accepting less money. According to research by House Buyer Bureau, 31% of UK home sellers over the last six months have fallen victim to gazundering, with a third saying it happened within a week of their exchange date. ‘We were so upset and angry,’ writer Katharine told Metro.co.uk. ‘It felt awful, everything had gone so smoothly until that point and then it felt like they were inventing issues that weren’t there to try to get money off.’ But the tactic worked for the buyer and, backed into a corner, they accepted £15,000 less than the original offer."

"Evie Richards, 25, was keen to sell the house she shared with her boyfriend after they broke up, so she could move on with her life. The deputy SEO editor from South London and her ex put the property on the market in February but didn’t accept an offer until June. ‘The offer was already around £20,000 below asking,’ she explained. ‘But it was at the bottom end of what the house was valued at and we weren’t making a loss (breaking more-or-less even) so reluctantly agreed – knowing that this is just how the market is, and we both wanted out of our current situation.’"

"By September, they were ready to sign on the dotted line when Evie got a call from her solicitor while she was at work. The buyer claimed that unless they were willing to accept an offer £30,000 less than agreed, he’d ‘walk away’ completely. She told Metro.co.uk: ‘My world shattered, and it took me a while to compose myself and get back to work. He said unfortunately this is common practice we’re seeing more and more, where buyers prey on desperation and time pressure and make ridiculous requests like this that you can’t afford to turn down.’"

"After a lot of back and forth, they were able to negotiate the price to £7,000 less than originally offered, along with amenities such as the brand new fridge and garden furniture thrown in. Yet Evie remembers the nerve-wracking ordeal as ‘a waste of time and money’ that left her ‘terrified that the buyer would pull out.’"

ABC News in Australia. "A suspected Ponzi scheme that has ensnared Melbourne racing identities and a senior AFL figure was offering returns of up to 8 per cent before the sudden death of its alleged mastermind last month. Some estimates have put the scale of losses in the scheme run by suburban Melbourne lawyer John Adams at $100 million – more than four times the amount high-profile Sydney con woman Melissa Caddick stole from her victims before disappearing in 2020. The Victorian Legal Services Commissioner is now working with police to investigate claims that solicitor Mr Adams, who passed away suddenly at the age of 81 last month, misappropriated funds invested in the mortgage lending scheme he operated out of his firm's Ivanhoe office for more than 40 years."

"ABC Investigations has obtained a letter Mr Adams sent to a client in 2019 promising returns of up to 8 per cent, at a time when major banks were offering about 1 per cent annually on term deposits. It says investors are paid the interest in monthly instalments. One investor told the ABC their payments continued up until the week before Mr Adams's death. The Victorian Bookmakers Association (VBA) earlier this week revealed it stands to lose about $1.8 million it invested with Mr Adams. The VBA's co-chairman Lyndon Hsu said the operation had the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme."

"'We have invested through AMS Lawyers for decades, and in 2019 we invested about $300,000 into the scheme,' he said. 'The way it works is that we would be connected with individual borrowers and individual properties and provided with documents showing that we would have a mortgage over the property. But unbeknownst to us at some stage that mortgage has been discharged and we no longer have control over the property.'"

"Mr Hsu said the association has been flooded with inquiries from bookmakers who also had personal savings invested in the scheme. But Mr Adams's clients extend beyond the racing industry. The ABC has also spoken to a senior AFL figure who said he stands to lose more than a million dollars through the scheme."

Newshub New Zealand. "Kiwis have shared their regrets about buying their first home as the cost-of-living crisis continues to bite. The regrets were sparked by a Reddit post titled 'Anyone regret buying their first home?,' which has seen over 230 people respond to it. The person started the post by saying, 'Just wonderting anyone have regret buying their first home? (sic)' before going on to explain his regret. For me, I bought a apartment last year and then two months after settlement, I was told that the building was in the process of a claim and I got special levy. And the body corporate committee is not transparent and they tried to keep everyone silent about the case and construction defects,' the poster said."

"The post was flooded with responses after it went up on Friday afternoon, with one person sharing their experience of the value of their house decreasing. 'Alot of the times yeah, when I see all of my friends overseas or out having fun and I'm just about scraping by with the mortgage. My house value has gone down and the mortgage barely decreases each month and I think to myself hmmmmm,' one commenter said."

"Another person commented saying, 'No such thing as a safe home. I got caught in a bad deal with a dodgy supplier. House got sold from under us.' A third person commented saying, 'I really wanted to sell when the value shot up during the pandemic but my partner refused & insisted they'll just keep going up forever like property in China (nek minnit).'"

South China Morning Post. "China's financial regulator has lowered the risk weightings on property sector-related loans for commercial lenders, as Beijing attempts to walk the fine line between salvaging the sector and defusing a local government debt crisis while also serving the real economy. The new financial regulator, the National Administration of Financial Regulation (NAFR), issued the changes on Wednesday, a day after the conclusion of the twice-a-decade central financial work conference, which prioritised risk control and contagion prevention."

"The risk weightings are covered under capital base rules, which determine the minimum amount a bank must hold in relation to the risk profile of its lending activities and other assets. China had 38.5 trillion yuan (US$5 trillion) of outstanding home mortgages at the end of September, according to the central bank. 'Unfortunately, bank loan losses have occurred and no 'regulatory tricks' can undo the losses. The only thing banks can do is to spread the losses across different stakeholders and across time,' said Chen Zhiwu, chair professor of finance at the University of Hong Kong. 'At the moment, the priority is to ensure the delivery of homes by sacrificing banks' interest to help developers complete projects … no one should think that these adjustments will help recover losses.'"