A report from the Durango Herald in Colorado. "Dave Bowman is starting to reconsider his choice to buy a home in Durango Hills. He and his wife bought the four-bedroom home at the end of September. It is nestled in a thinned stand of ponderosa pines at the toe of Missionary Ridge, not far from the southern edge of the 2002 fire. Wendy Most, a State Farm insurance agent in Durango, wrote the couple a quote for homeowners insurance. But six days before closing, the State Farm office called to inform the Bowmans that it could not write them a policy. 'If I would have known it was gonna be this nightmare, I might not have bought this house,' Dave said, as welders crackle behind him, rebuilding his wooden deck with fireproof metal."

"Around September 2023, something – likely the maximum risk score the company was willing to insure – definitely changed. Suddenly, addresses in parts of Durango West, Forest Lakes, Edgemont developments and near Purgatory Resort could not be insured. William Borkett, the treasurer of the Cascade Village HOA, said American Family Insurance suddenly declined to renew coverage of the development’s condominium buildings and community center in June 2023. After an exhaustive search, he was able to find one option: a high-risk pool. The HOA’s annual property and liability premiums jumped from $57,000 annually to $569,000. The 10-factor increase caused HOA fees for condo owners to jump $3,900. 'It’s significantly impacted the owners,' Borkett said."

"The way insurance brokers and Colorado Insurance Commissioner Michael Conway see it, there are a few escape valves still in place to protect consumers. The first may be changing economic trends. 'If interest rates start to come down, reinsurers will want to employ their capital in riskier ways than they are right now,' Conway said."

The Pensacola News Journal. "Florida property owners have been struggling to cope with soaring home insurance premiums, and now they're experiencing another rising cost: HOA fees. However, condo owners are experiencing the most significant jump in HOA fees. What's driving those fees for condo owners is an ugly mesh of inflation, home insurance premiums and a law stemming from the collapse of the Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, in June 2021. In Altamonte Springs, residents of Lakewood Park Condos told WESH 2 that their HOA fees increased nearly 100%. Owners living in the complex's smallest unit, a 649-square-foot condo, now pay $712.93 monthly for their HOA fees."

"A Spectrum News report revealed that the Wekiva Country Club Villas Homeowners Association in Longwood similarly raised their HOA fees as their annual insurance premium rose from $91,000 in 2023 to a whopping $233,000 in 2024. For HOAs, the price of rising inflation hit from every direction: The rising cost of materials and labor means maintenance and services HOAs use increased in turn. Last year, the Insurance Information Institute (Triple-I) projected that insurance rates in the Sunshine State could increase by at least 40%. Mark Friedlander, the Triple-I's director of communications, said that the average Florida homeowner is paying nearly $6,000, more than triple the U.S. average of $1,700 annually."

WFAE in North Carolina. "After years of empty floors, ghostly parking decks and tumbleweed-esque sidewalks, the city of Charlotte’s economic development staff are prepping City Council members to give some kind of public assistance for uptown office tower owners. Last Monday, economic development director Tracy Dodson invited former Ballantyne real estate executive Ned Curran to talk about how work-from-home has crippled the office market. Curran ticked off office vacancy rates across the city: Ballantyne — 31%. University — 39%. SouthPark and uptown — 21%. Those numbers aren’t simply as bad as the 2008 Great Recession: They’re actually much worse. 'We are in unprecedented times,' said Curran, who is the former CEO of the company that built the Ballantyne Corporate Park."

"He told council members that in five uptown buildings, half of the floors are empty. And over the next 18 months, 1.7 million additional square-feet leases will expire — many of which will not be renewed, Curran said. 'We know it’s not going to get better,' he said. 'They will not renew at the same rate, if they renew at all.' Curran told council members that 'what has to happen here is a lot of these buildings just need to go away.' By 'go away,' he means be demolished. He floated the idea of whether the city would want to 'participate' financially in tearing down old skyscrapers."

CBS New on New York. "City office buildings are in trouble. For a century, the towers have been propped up by two pillars. One, workers filling the buildings all week. Two, money flowing freely in the form of loans to borrow, buy, and build. Those days are over. As hybrid work hardens from trend to new normal, office occupancy rates have hit all-time lows. Meanwhile interest rates have spiked to historic highs… and now the mortgage comes due: $1.5 trillion in commercial real estate loans expire in the next two years. It's enough to make you rethink the future of cities. We criss-crossed Manhattan, talking to players big and small, about a sector rocked to its foundations."

"What is New York City without its skyline? Monuments to commerce, standing proudly shoulder-to-shoulder. More office space than any city in the world. But peek inside all this vertical real estate and there's a fundamental question. Where IS everyone? More than 95 million square feet of New York office space currently unoccupied - the equivalent of 30 Empire State Buildings. Scott Rechler is CEO of RXR, a New York real estate company with more than $20 billion in holdings. We walked through his property at 61 Broadway, near Wall Street. Every other floor—half the building—lies empty. Scott Rechler: 'I think this is an existential moment. You know, I call it crossing the chasm.'"

From Bisnow. "It was an uncharacteristically dreary day in Los Angeles County when a full-block Pasadena office property hit the auction block with a $114M opening bid — less than half its prior sale price. Despite the attractive price point and the many selling points of the Pasarroyo office complex, the results of the auction were equally glum. No one bid and the property remained with its lender, Heitman. It’s a scene playing out on courthouse steps and under awnings of municipal and county buildings in greater numbers across the country. With commercial real estate loan distress at a 10-year high, foreclosure auctions like these are growing increasingly common."

"Office properties Houston, Miami and Washington, D.C., an apartment building in Atlanta, and one Margaritaville-themed hotel have gone to auction in the last five months, to name a few. No property type is immune from the kind of financial distress that can lead to a foreclosure auction, but with an estimated 44% of office properties nationwide underwater on their loans, they are the most likely to end up on the block right now. However, going to auction rarely means that a building will actually end up with a new owner. 'At this point, there's been a lot of room and willingness on the part of lenders to do workouts, forbearance agreements and work with the borrowers, rather than take over, especially with office buildings. I don’t know that lenders really want to take ownership in the current market,' said Kathleen Muñoz, a Dallas-based partner at Hunton Andrews Kurth. But, 'I think at some point, patience will start wearing thin and people will have to start moving forward with taking control of properties,' Muñoz added."

Mile High CRE. "The past year has seen office buildings across diverse markets, including Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC, experiencing significant value declines, with some areas witnessing more than 20% Y-o-Y declines. According to IRR’s report, nearly 63% of office markets are now in recession, highlighting a widespread downturn in the sector. Multifamily: Only 13% of markets are in recession, but a significant percentage (63%) are in hypersupply, mainly due to rapid capital deployment in 2021-2022, indicating a potential imbalance of supply and demand."

"Multifamily housing starts are reaching decades-long highs, with projections of 1.5 million units delivered by 2025. This high rate of new unit delivery, especially in markets like Austin, Nashville, and Charlotte, is outpacing sustainable demand trends. In many of these high-supply markets, the rent-to-income ratio is already above 30%, posing affordability challenges, especially in Sunbelt metros that have traditionally boasted cost advantages."

From Info News. "There's been plenty of fear recently about people losing their homes because they can’t afford higher interest rates on their mortgages. The reality is the mortgage foreclosure rate in Kelowna, BC and the rest of the country, has been declining steadily for the past decade. 'One of the things that has happened, over that period when the mortgage default rate was going down, was rising house prices' Dean Prentice, licensed insolvency trustee with MNP LTD and a senior vice-president of the company that bills itself as the largest insolvency practice in Canada, told iNFOnews.ca. 'That was an advantage to a lot of people because, if they had financial difficulties, they could go out and simply sell the house, pay the mortgage and then take care of some of their unsecured debt – or all their unsecured debt – their credit cards and all.'"

"'The banks are doing everything they can not to foreclose,' Prentice said. 'Re-amortize. Stretch those amortization periods out to 30 years, to 40 years. Put the money towards the interest instead of the principal. It’s going to cost you a lot more to pay off your mortgage because now you’re just paying off interest and not getting the principal down but it's preventing people from defaulting on their mortgages.'"

"'In the last couple of years – especially in the last year with the change in the real estate market – that capacity to sell your house to get the equity out to pay off your unsecured debt, that’s gone away for a lot of people,' Prentice said. 'Some people are feeling stuck because they can’t sell their house or there are fears that, if they sell their house, they won’t have enough money for a down payment on a new home and that they won’t qualify because they will have to re-qualify for the stress test.'"

Stoke on Trent Live in the UK. "A homeowner with '244 snags' at his new-build property is staging a one-man protest - on his garage door. Mark Webb-Johnson has paid £240 for a 12x7 foot sign listing some of his complaints about the four-bed Anwyl Homes property. The sign reads: 'Buy Anwyl Home, over 200 snags. First floor not level, exterior walls out of NHBC tolerances, interior walls/ceiling out of NHBC tolerance, nine months and counting.' Now the factory manager wishes he had never bought the £420,000 house on Alexandra Gardens, in Crewe. He remains in talks with the National House Building Council (NHBC) and Anwyl."

"Issues highlighted included cracked mortar, damaged fascia board, cracked bricks, rattling doors, and a leaking shower - as well as scratches and paint stains. Mark said: 'It’s just diabolical. I’m getting in touch with them constantly. Every time you say anything to them about a problem, they send someone round who tells me it’s not a problem. There appears to be no thought for how the house is affecting people. It’s causing a lot of issues.'"

7 News in Australia. "Another Victorian building firm looks set to be swallowed up by the state’s construction crisis, leaving the housing dreams of close to 100 customers in limbo. South Melbourne builder Montego Homes went into voluntary administration on Monday, with Sam Kaso and Shaun Matthews from advisory firm Cor Cordis appointed to restructure the business. Montego offers house and land packages and had 18 projects underway before Monday, on top of a 'pipeline of future' work. In all, 90 customers have been impacted and 11 Montego employees are now without a job."

From ABC News. "According to a survey by financial comparison website Finder, nearly two-thirds of renters say housing costs are causing financial stress. But, as painful as the increase in rents has been, it's still only just ahead of the increase in home values over those same three years from 2020-2023. Go back further and there's no contest. For all but three of the past 11 years housing prices have grown faster than rents. Usually much faster. Even though most Australian landlords own just one investment property, there are still plenty with two or more. What's the problem? Aside from the obvious one, that home ownership is becoming increasingly out of reach for the third of Australians who aren't already there, there's another huge problem with prices surging far above rents."

"It's indicative of a massive misallocation of capital … a waste of money. When professionals make an investment, they look at the return (or yield) and compare it to the risk they're taking. The average gross rental yield on residential property nationally was 3.7 per cent in December, according to CoreLogic. That means the average Australian property investor who purchased a place in December 2023 is initially making a return of 3.7 per cent per annum — and that's before any expenses, like interest costs, management fees and repairs. In Sydney, it was just 3 per cent."

"According to the most recent RBA/APRA data for November, the average variable interest rate on new property investment loans was 6.5 per cent. In what financial universe is it a good investment to borrow a massive sum of money to receive a return that's half what you'll pay in interest? 'Strayan property, apparently. She'll be right, mate. No worries. Of course, through negative gearing, you can write off the losses against other income to reduce your tax bill. But you'll still be making losses. So, in the end, basically what you're betting on as an Australian landlord is capital gains, which will be taxed at half the rate of any income you actually work for."

"Any investment that's primarily reliant on capital gain rather than future income generation for its return shares at least one thing in common with a Ponzi scheme. Both rely on the next investors to pay out the profits of the earlier ones. In the case of real estate that means a new generation of buyers willing — and able — to stump up more cash to pay a higher price than the previous ones. That worked a treat while interest rates were falling, boosting borrowing capacity for any given income level. It's much more challenging as rates rise."

"We tie up the majority of our wealth in the value we put on land we've already occupied, and now buy and sell from each other to the tune of more than $400 billion each year. The biggest cliché of popular personal finance books is to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. But, as a nation, that's exactly what we've done with housing and, even without a major property crash in recent history, we're already a lot poorer for it."