A report from the Marina Times in California. "In San Francisco 251 homes were sold in September, down 23 percent from the previous year. Homeowners are reluctant to sell their homes now because of the cost of securing a replacement home. And those who do choose to sell their homes often have unrealistic expectations when it comes to the value of their properties. 'San Francisco sellers are not quite up to date on the market. They are being overly aggressive on pricing,' said Eileen Mougeot with Corcoran. 'Everyone has heard about high mortgage rates, but insurance has also become a big deal. And between these two things, buyers are being more cautious. They still want to buy, but they are just being a lot more conservative.'"

"'Sellers are having a hard time accepting this,' Mougeot continued. 'I’m seeing a lot more prices reduced, and if they aren’t reduced, homes are on the market for a lot longer — particularly at the higher end of the market. Sellers are just not going to get what they were going to get a year and a half ago.' San Francisco home prices peaked in April 2022. The median price of a single- family home that month was $2.1 million, and the median price for all San Francisco homes that month was $1.6 million. In September 2023, those median prices had fallen to $1.65 million and $1.4 million, respectively."

"What’s more, according to an October Business Times report, Bay Area workers who took advantage of remote work during the pandemic to move to far away, lower-cost cities may now find themselves in a painful predicament if called back to the office. Some of the hottest cities for those joining the Bay Area exodus — are seeing home prices fall sharply from their pandemic peaks. August’s median home prices in Austin, Dallas, and Boise, are all down 18 percent from their peaks reached in May 2022."

The Times Union on Connecticut. "The streets in Katie Barcelo's neighborhood aren't quite finished. In fact, her home is surrounded by others that have been unfinished for more than a year. Barcelo's Cambridge Court neighborhood in Simsbury has been incomplete for years, now. There are no street signs or stop signs, and the street lights are not connected to electricity. Drainage systems are incomplete and erosion is evident. 'I love my house. I love my neighbors,' Barcelo said. 'I'd love it a lot more if I could pick up my house and move it somewhere else. Some day it may be great, but my kids will be in college by then,' said Barcelo, who has two young children.'"

"Complaints and lawsuits from neighborhood residents have finally culminated in action. William Ferrigno, arrested earlier this month on a larceny charge by local police, now has the attention of Connecticut Attorney General William Tong. Last week Ferrigno, the owner of Sunlight Construction Inc. and developer of Barcelo's neighborhood, had criminal charges filed against him by Tong's office: three counts of failing to refund deposits. Officials have said Ferrigno collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in deposits for the construction of new luxury homes in Avon and Burlington, but never built the homes or returned the deposits."

From Curbed. "For a while in the early days of COVID, it felt as if everyone from the city was either Airbnb-ing at a house upstate or buying a house upstate to Airbnb it. 'People discovered there was this hack to buying a second home and having other people pay for it,' says Jennifer Grimes, an upstate broker and the owner of Country House Realty. 'You could get on the real-estate ladder even if you couldn’t afford to buy in New York City.' And even if you could afford to buy in New York City, why not earn a little extra money to offset the taxes? 'Everyone was an Airbnb buyer,' Grimes says. 'Or at least it felt like everyone was.'"

"Three years later, things have changed. It also doesn’t help that buyers were snapping up everything that hit the market in the low-interest-rate era. Weekend visitors paying $600 a night before the cleaning fee want a modernist showpiece with pale-wood interiors, not a suburban-style ranch near the highway. 'It’s a sea of mediocrity,' says one broker of the mid-tier Airbnbs. All of this has, of course, led to some buyer’s remorse. Grimes says she recently noticed some of her agents were re-listing houses people had only just bought. 'People were not making the money they thought they would. It was a bit of a gut punch.' Although not too much of a gut punch, she added: Prices in Ulster County, for example, did go up 56 percent between 2020 and 2022, after all."

The Tampa Free Press. "Many Americans are convinced that the federal government either does too much to control their daily lives or does not work at all. Yet whatever work is getting done in Washington is not being done in the spacious office buildings supplied by taxpayers. According to The Washington Times, many federal office buildings are ghost towns — sans the tumbleweeds. The Times reported last week on a new Government Accountability Office report that revealed two dozen federal agencies had offices with an average vacancy rate of about 80% during the time period the GAO studied earlier this year. 'Not a single agency topped 50% use,' the Times noted."

"As the Tampa Free Press reported in early October, a watchdog group known as Open the Books issued a report that found eight federal agencies spent $3.3 billion on new furniture from 2020 to 2022, even as none them topped 35% occupancy in that time because of the pandemic. Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski noted in a statement at the time, 'For some reason, we’ve bankrolled another billion dollars in desks, chairs, couches and more — while employees clock in from their own living rooms.'"

From Fortune. "The housing market has gotten so unaffordable and difficult to navigate, you’d be forgiven for thinking there was some kind of conspiracy. A Missouri jury just decided there actually was. Around 2pm ET in a federal courtroom, a jury found the National Association of Realtors, and the largest national real-estate broker franchisors, including Berkshire Hathaway’s HomeServices, had conspired to artificially inflate the home-sale commissions paid to real estate agents. The jury ordered NAR and others to pay nearly $1.8 billion in damages to a class of more than 250,000 home sellers. Under antitrust law, that figure can be tripled to over $5 billion, at the court’s discretion."

"When the lawsuit was initially filed, it included Anywhere Real Estate (formerly known as Realogy) as a co-conspirator to NAR’s practices, but that company reportedly settled out for $83.5 million. The market digested the news by immediately taking major brokerage stocks down 5% or more. Just a few hours after the verdict, the big drops included Zillow plunging by $600 million, eXp World Holdings by $200 million, and Opendoor by $150 million. On the smaller side, Redfin lost $32 million and Compass lost $61 million. This means that the market wiped out over $1 billion from brokerage stock in a matter of hours as their business model got a stiff challenge from a Kansas City jury."

The Globe and Mail. "Canadian homeowners are increasingly turning to alternative and private lenders as rising interest rates make it harder to qualify for a mortgage from a bank, new data show. The total value of outstanding loans from credit unions, mortgage investment corporations and other private lenders reached $388.6-billion in the second quarter of this year, according to Statistics Canada’s survey of non-bank mortgage lenders. The stress test does not apply to non-bank lenders. 'Due to more difficulty in qualifying, many folks have to take a private mortgage,' said David Steinfeld, who has seen an uptick in demand for private lenders at his firm Stonefield Mortgage."

"The other factor driving borrowers to the alternative mortgage market is homeowners’ inability to make higher mortgage payments. 'A lot of homeowners are having a difficult time paying their mortgage,' said Samantha Brookes, chief executive of mortgage brokerage Mortgages of Canada. 'Some are refinancing and ending up with a higher interest rate. Others are not able to refinance if they had purchased in the past few years.' For borrowers who have no choice but to sell, they are doing so as home prices have been declining. Some homeowners are trying to hold out for the high prices that were around during the height of the pandemic and are turning to short-term financing as they wait for a better time to sell. 'Sellers who are not solvent are taking short-term loans to bridge them to a sale, trying to avoid drastic price reductions,' Mr. Steinfeld said."

"The higher the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio, the higher the risk is for the lender if their borrower stops making payments and the lender has to sell the property. Because home prices have been falling, lenders have been reducing their qualifying LTVs. Ms. Brookes said her brokerage is having a difficult time finding a lender for borrowers with high levels of debt and in locations where home prices have dropped. 'Lenders are very strict and typically do not make exceptions on their LTV,' she said. 'Lenders don’t want to take on the risk.'"

The Evening Standard. "The number of mortgages approved to home buyers fell to the lowest level since January in September, while remortgage approvals slumped to a 24-year low, according to Bank of England figures. Simon Gammon, managing partner at Knight Frank Finance, said: 'The traditional autumn pick-up in housing market activity failed to materialise this year. Mortgage rates have eased to a plateau following a volatile year and it’s going to take some time for buyers to get to grips with what they can now afford.'"

"Alice Haine, personal finance analyst at investment platform Bestinvest, said: 'The era of cheap money is well and truly over, so households should prioritise clearing expensive unsecured debt and building up a rainy-day pot to withstand any unexpected expenses.'"

From The Local. "Norway's rental market is once again making headlines - this time for the influx of homes onto the market rather than a supply shortage. Christian Rasmussen, the managing director of the rental platform Hybel, told the newspaper Finansavisen that there had been a 50 to 70 percent rise in rental advertisements compared to the previous year. During this period, Hybel has seen a total of 1,767 homes advertised for rent, compared to 1,143 during the same timeframe in the previous year, indicating an average growth rate of 55 percent."

"The reason for the increasing number of homes becoming available for rent is more home going unsold. This means sellers are temporarily renting them out while they wait for the market to pick back up. Not all real estate industry analysts are convinced that the latest developments in Oslo's rental market will stand the test of time. Managing director of the Norwegian Association of Estate Agents, Carl O. Geving, told The Local that the recent headlines might be somewhat overstated. 'I'm not too sure about it. Maybe it's somewhat overstated. A lot of new homes were sold in 2021, and now the buyers are taking them over. One can see that the market is slower now; maybe you need more time to sell a used home, and some people will probably rent it out if it's difficult to sell… However, I'm not sure that these figures are accurate. In my opinion, it's a bit overstated; the situation isn't that bad (that people are renting out properties because they can't sell them),' Geving said."

From News.com.au. "A NSW building company says it is on the brink of collapse after failing to pay a court-ordered refund to a customer and the regulator seeking to have it struck off the business register. The sole director of the company has notified a court of plans to place the business into liquidation, though it has yet to go under. Inventive Building Pty Ltd, which according to ASIC trades under the name Panelup, is a Wollongong-based business on the NSW south coast that specialises in off-site manufacturing for add-ons to existing houses."

"John Liou claims his experience with the building firm has been nothing short of a nightmare and now he is waiting for the business to either go into liquidation or pay him back his money. Mr Liou, from Sydney, was looking to put a granny flat in his backyard so he could move in his 75-year-old mother with health conditions to take better care of her, and engaged Inventive Building. 'They kept saying it will be ready in six weeks. They never did anything,' Mr Liou, 50, lamented to news.com.au."

"Mr Liou signed a contract with Inventive Building in March last year, paying $53,000 as a deposit for the $65,000 build. Fast forward 18 months, and there has been no progress on his build, while the holes sit unused in the back of his home, gathering leaves. 'I’m paying interest on the $53,000 loan I’ve taken out,' Mr Liou added."

South China Morning Post. "Hong Kong's sliding home prices have snared more mortgage borrowers in negative equity as the market value of their properties decreased at a faster rate than their loan balances. So-called upside down loans more than tripled to 11,123 cases in the third quarter, according to data released on Tuesday by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA). The aggregate value of negative-equity loans also more than tripled to HK$59.3 billion (US$7.6 billion), compared with HK$17.4 billion at the end of June. 'This is worrisome if we look at the aggregate value,' said Hannah Jeong, head of valuation and advisory services at Colliers Hong Kong. 'It is almost double [the aggregate value] of the 2005 and 2008 slumps.'"

"Cases soared to 12,164 at the end of December - the highest mark since the first quarter of 2005 - as home prices plunged a further 7.7 per cent in the fourth quarter after falling 8.5 per cent for the first three quarters, according to the HKMA. The current high level of negative-equity cases largely relates to bank staff housing loans or loans under mortgage insurance programmes, which generally have higher loan-to-value ratios, the HKMA said. Hong Kong's property prices began to slip in the second half of this year due to a number of factors, including high interest rates, falling transactions and developers' price cuts on new home sales, said Eric Tso, chief vice-president at mReferral Mortgage Brokerage Services. Coupled with a high level of unsold inventory of new flats, developers will tend to sell at low prices, he said."

The Wall Street Journal. "After being stuck in a housing downturn for two years, cities across China are giving real-estate developers the go-ahead to cut prices on new homes to revive sales. They are quickly running into resistance from homeowners who don’t want to see the values of their properties go down. In Huizhou, a southern Chinese city near the metropolis of Shenzhen, one of the country’s largest state-owned developers dropped its prices during a national holiday in early October. Apartments in Poly Sunshine Town, a large high-rise complex, were on sale for about half the price that other units went for in 2020 and 2021."

"The lower prices were met with strong opposition from residents who previously bought homes in the same development. Some of them complained to local government officials, accusing the developer of disrupting the market, and demanded compensation for their losses. Under pressure, the local housing authority ordered the developer, a unit of China Poly Group, to stop the reductions and invalidate all contracts with the lower prices, according to National Business Daily, a Chinese media outlet. Similar incidents took place in October in Wuhan, the capital city of central China’s Hubei province, and in Xiamen, in the southeastern Fujian province, according to property agents and local media reports."

"'This is a tug of war among homeowners, developers and local governments as the market continues to seek its bottom,' said Bruce Pang, chief China economist at Jones Lang LaSalle. In mid-October, a video posted on the Chinese social-media platform Douyin—which was verified by a local property agent in Xiamen—showed people shouting 'refund the difference' outside a sales office of Poly, the same developer that had cut prices in Huizhou. On a message board used by residents to contact the Xiamen government, one poster wrote that the developer 'maliciously' lowered prices by half a million yuan, equivalent to around $68,000, overnight. 'We implore the government to stand up for us, to revoke the illegal sales contracts, and to compensate homeowners for our losses,' it added."

"'Maintaining social stability is important,' said Tao Ran, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shenzhen. Local governments also don’t want home prices to fall too much, because that could cause land values to plunge and further reduce a key source of their revenue, he said. If prices aren’t reduced, it would be impossible for the market to bottom out, Tao said. 'People need to feel that this is not the beginning of a sinking spiral,' he added."