A report from the Washington Examiner. "The price of everything is up since 2020, but in absolute terms nothing has gone up more than mortgages. With the 2024 presidential contest coming into focus, housing affordability will be among the economic issues at play. 'We are seeing people hold off — they might be looking, oops the rates went up one more time, and they’re like, 'I’m out,' Minneapolis-based real estate broker Patty Zuzek told the Washington Examiner's Zachary Halaschak."

The Miami Herald in Florida. "Rising housing costs burden half of all homeowners and renters in Miami-Dade County. And the situation is getting worse. Thousands quit looking or moved elsewhere. Data from U.S. Census Bureau reported Miami-Dade had a population loss of 28,000 residents from 2020 to 2022, the biggest decline for any county in the state."

Bisnow South Florida. "A wave of new arrivals helped insulate South Florida from much of the pressures facing the commercial real estate sector, but an influx of wealth and people to the region hasn’t been enough to overcome the weight of interest rates. There are $100B in multifamily loans maturing across the country next year, said Anthony Candela, vice president at Slate Asset Management, said at Bisnow’s South Florida CRE Finance conference, with many of those loans underwritten in 2021 on properties that have seen capitalization rates nearly double. 'We expect there to be a lot of blood in the water,' he said. 'I think the market just needs a reset. We’ve basically stopped looking at new acquisitions and have shifted focus to distressed.'"

"With the Fed’s benchmark interest rate now between 5.25% and 5.5%, the highest in more than two decades, many deals don’t make financial sense. 'For a lot of the buyers right now, that four-cap or five-cap deal just no longer makes sense, versus 18 or 24 months ago when people were fighting for those deals,' said Tomas Sulichin, president of the commercial real estate division at Related ISG Realty."

"Ray Cleeman, principal and head of capital markets at Miami-based Pensam Capital, has also been fielding calls from debt funds looking for cash to help carry them through. Many are seeking to prop up their collateralized loan obligations to keep the debt from coming back onto their books, curtailing their ability to transact, he said. 'We’ve seen cracks in the dam, but we haven’t yet seen the water coming through,' he said. 'Over the next six, nine, 12 months, the dam will break and we will see real estate trade, because it has to trade.'"

The Advocate in Louisiana. "Will renters in Metairie be rushing to pay as much as $3,250 a month for units in the new 'Metro at Clearview' apartment complex at the Clearview shopping center site? Atlanta-based Audubon, the developers of the $55 million, 270-unit residential block, have bet they will and have started to sign up tenants to move in next spring when the interiors and landscaping are completed. Gina Winters, a real estate agent for Latter & Blum, said other factors that should favor The Metro include a weak home-buying market. The steep increase in interest rates over the last two years has cooled off the housing market nationally and in the Greater New Orleans area, where the median sale price in the 10 months through October was down 2.2%, according to the New Orleans Metro Association of Realtors. Amid all the uncertainty, many people are choosing to stay on the sidelines and rent, resulting in a 21% decline in home sales through October. 'It's a good market for leasing right now because of all the uncertainty we're having in the home sales market,' said Winters."

The Mercury News in California. "A $2,000-a-month studio apartment might not be considered a good deal in most parts of the country. But in the Bay, it might be — especially if the landlord throws in a sweetener. As thousands of new units hit the market around the Bay Area, concessions — such as free rent or free parking — are becoming more common, especially in apartment complexes. As of October, two in five apartment listings in the San Francisco and Oakland metro areas were offering concessions, and half of listings in San Jose offered them, according to Zillow."

"The new units are a result of a mini building boom that hit the Bay Area during a time of low interest rates during the COVID pandemic, primarily concentrated in urban centers like Oakland and San Jose. In 2022, 3,158 new multifamily units were completed in Oakland, and 1,314 in San Jose, according to data from the California Department of Housing and Community Development. The Skylyne, a 402-unit, 24-story building that opened in 2020, reached 95% occupancy last year, but it is still offering concessions during the slower holiday season to compete with neighboring apartments. 'Even during renewals, we’re offering two or three months free,' said Isabella Easton, assistant community manager. 'It’s keeping residents, and it’s getting them through the door.'"

The Real Deal on New York. "A decade after breaking ground, mired in delays and facing a 2025 deadline to complete its affordable housing, Brooklyn’s controversial Pacific Park is slipping away from its developer. Greenland is set to lose control of the delayed second phase of the 22-acre development formerly known as Atlantic Yards. The company has defaulted on nearly $350 million worth of loans tied to the six rental development sites of Pacific Park’s Phase 2, The Real Deal has learned. The lender has moved to foreclose on the sites. Greenland USA, a subsidiary of China’s state-owned Greenland Group, has been in default for roughly a year on two loans totaling $349 million. The loans cover the six incomplete sites at Pacific Park (out of 15 project sites in all) that are slated for more than 3,200 units — if they are ever built."

"Greenland borrowed the money in 2014 from Nick Mastroianni’s U.S. Immigration Fund, which had raised capital through the cash-for-visas EB-5 program. The developer defaulted on the loans when they matured last November and in January, according to an offering memo from Newmark. Greenland has faced trouble elsewhere. Last year the company was forced to take a $200 million loss when it sold its 59-story Thea at Metropolis apartment building in Downtown Los Angeles."

From CBC News in Canada. "While facing a housing crisis, the City of London will see fewer building permit applications this year, a situation builders said is mainly due to high interest rates cooling the market for new homes. City staff reports coming to a council's planning committee show the number of building permits issued in 2023 is down sharply from the previous year. The main factor holding back building permits is high interest rates and a general belief that they will come down, at least a bit, in the new year, said Mike Wallace, head of the London Development Institute (LDI), which represents most of the city's largest developers. 'The buying public for new homes, they're sitting on the sidelines,' he said. 'It's a risk for a builder to pull a building permit and start the building process and then not have a buyer for it.'"

From The Local. "As early as 2021, Deutsche Bank predicted that the boom cycle in the German real estate market would come to an end in the near future. The expiry date they gave: 2024. Half a pandemic and an energy crisis later, their analysis seems all but certain. With Germany on the verge of sliding from a technical recession into a very real one in the fourth quarter, it seems only logical that the housing market will follow suit. The biggest bust is currently unfolding in the construction sector. The Ifo Institute for Economic Research recently reported that the number of construction project cancellations hit a new high in October, with 22 percent of companies saying they had to scrap projects."

"'It keeps on getting worse, and more and more projects are failing due to increased interest rates and rising construction costs,' says Klaus Wohlrabe, head of Ifo's survey department. These additional costs are weighing heavily on the sector, as many previously lucrative construction projects have become unprofitable. After peaking in 2022, home prices have now fallen by more than ten percent. 'The new economic environment will make it impossible for more and more people to buy real estate,' says ING chief economist Carsten Brzeski. 'Rising interest rates have pushed about half of all potential buyers out of the real estate market.'"

ABC News in Australia. "Bipartisan support for temporary extra government spending to preserve businesses and jobs through JobKeeper was one of the few positive outcomes from the COVID-19 pandemic. It's worth considering now whether the same logic could be applied to create a 'HomeKeeper' program, especially given Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock's recent message that interest rates could stay higher for longer than expected. The latest Roy Morgan survey of stress among owner-occupied mortgagors showed near-record numbers of people 'at stress,' numbering 1,514,000, or over 30 per cent of mortgage holders. Nearly a million of them (967,000) are considered 'extremely at risk.'"

"RedBridge pollster Kos Samaras has been regularly drawing attention to the extent of mortgage stress in social media posts all year. By mid-2023, Samaras says, 'over 1.1 million borrowers in just NSW and Victoria were experiencing negative cash flow' — that is, 'income not enough to meet repayments and other expenses.'"

From Stuff. "New Zealanders are withdrawing money from their KiwiSaver schemes to help them through financial hardship at twice the rate of last year – and one supervisor says it’s largely because of rising interest rates. Data from Inland Revenue shows that there was $21.5 million withdrawn from KiwiSaver accounts for reasons of financial hardship in October, up from $10.3m in October 2022. That is compared to an increase from $77.7m to $104.7m million over the same period for first home withdrawals. David Callanan, general manager of corporate trustee services at Public Trust, said there had been a 'crazy' increase in the number of applications being received. 'We’re clearing more than a thousand a month regularly now and that would have been absolutely unheard of before Covid. That’s just becoming absolutely the norm now.'"

"If the year-to-date data was extrapolated for the whole year, it would mean more than 13,000 applications processed, or twice that of the 2022 year. He said it used to be that a change in employment circumstances was the main driver for an application. Now, many people were still in the same jobs but struggling with things like higher interest rates. 'They were not prepared, have not budgeted… their home loan rolls over and payments go up, and they’re just not able to cope.'"

South China Morning Post. "Homebuyers in Shenzhen have shown interest in upgrading their homes after the local government eased some policy measures, agents said, but expectations of lower incomes amid slower economic growth, which means people are still hesitant about big-ticket purchases, continue to be a key hurdle. 'The policy merely lures home upgraders who have spare money to purchase another home,' said Cao Jiayong, an agent in Shenzhen. The easing will not spur the overall market, because it is still difficult for the vast majority of Shenzhen residents to buy a second home, Cao said. '[Right] now, this is a buyer's market in Shenzhen,' said Andy Lee, Centaline's China CEO. 'More homeowners are urgently selling, rather than buying another home.'"