It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Housing sales in Hampton Roads increased slightly during November and December 2023, leading to about 3,500 residential listings being active in December. 'Most people qualify for more than they want to take on for a mortgage payment,' Southern Trust Mortgage Loan Officer Pat Miller said."

"The Federal Reserve's pursuit of lower inflation has proven to be an obstacle for the American housing market. The consequence of that pursuit, which pushed up borrowing costs on U.S. households, is a 16 percent year-over-year surge in mortgage delinquencies (60 days past due), according to TransUnion's fourth-quarter report. With roughly 84 million mortgages active in the U.S., according to data from LendingTree, that would mean about 1,092,000 Americans are more than 60 days past due on their mortgages. 'We don't have anything like that systemic problem today,' said Michele Raneri, head of U.S. research at TransUnion. Indeed, the amount of mortgages that are 60 days past due are ebbing at historically low levels long term, dating to 2005."

"The Justice Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has sued Colony Ridge, a Texas based lender and developer, for allegedly operating an illegal land sales scheme and targeting tens of thousands of Hispanic borrowers with false statements and predatory loans. The complaint also claims the company sold unsuspecting families flood-prone land without water, sewer or electrical infrastructure, and set them up to fail with loans they can’t afford. 'That’s essentially the message that this lawsuit is putting out into the world,' said Nicole Cabañez with the National Consumer Law Center. 'That you cannot, you cannot target a population that you consider to be vulnerable with expensive products that are built to fail.'"

"In December 2022, Gen Zers McCall and Cole Porter jumped at the chance to buy a home in a market that was difficult for many people their age. The Porters found their $415,000 two-story townhome in a relatively new development area of Saratoga Springs. Cole Porter said they chose the Saratoga Springs home because it was the best deal and was seller-financed. 'We heard from a friend of a friend who knows a lady that was selling this house,' Porter said. 'She moved into it brand new, but her job at the last second had to move her to Logan, so she needed to sell it quickly.' Porter said the seller would have lost money selling it the traditional route, 'So, instead, we just took over her payments.'"

"New York Community Bancorp boosted its lost-loss reserves by 790% or $490 million in the fourth quarter from the previous quarter, more than any other bank in its class, as it faces potential challenges in its office and multi-family loan portfolio. Matthew Cypher, director of the Steers Center for Global Real Estate at Georgetown University, 'Banks have made real-estate loans that they’ll have to take their lumps on.' The rapid rise in interest rates has also taken a toll on portfolios by making debt more expensive for potential refinancings, at a time when office space pricing has yet to find a bottom in many markets, Cypher said. 'We drank a lot of cheap debt for a long time and the reckoning is painful,' Cypher said."

"Sales in the Greater Toronto Area jumped 37 per cent in January compared with January of last year. The data show early signs of life in the housing market, but Andre Kutyan, broker with Harvey Kalles Real Estate, said that while it means homeowners are able to sell, many were forced to reduce the asking prices they set last summer and fall. For example, Mr. Kutyan points to a two-plus-one bedroom unit at the Four Seasons Private Residences in Toronto that he recently sold for $5.93-million – which was still half a million below the asking price set last summer – and less than the current owners paid more than two years ago. The sellers purchased the unit, located at 50 Yorkville Ave., in late 2021 for $6.25-million. They listed it last July for $6.495-million before Mr. Kutyan lowered the asking price – first to $6.395-million in the fall, and then to $6.250-million, where it sat for the rest of the year. 'As long as everyone’s acting reasonably, we can get to a result,' he says."

"As his real estate empire showed signs of trouble, a robed Robby Clark appeared in a promotional video, standing at the bow of a yacht, arms raised to the sky as a camera circled overhead. 'You can stick me in the desert with nothing and I'm going to come out owning the desert,' Clark is heard saying at another point in the three-minute video. Maps of Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury appear — they're among the Ontario communities where he owned an estimated 800 properties and thousands of tenants lived. 'I'm going to have a billion dollars in holdings,' Clark says."

"But behind the scenes, Clark's business, SID Developments, and 11 connected corporations had taken on millions of dollars in debt and were struggling to keep up with payments to lenders, according to documents filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. Meanwhile, rundown properties sat vacant, and utility bills, property taxes and contractors went unpaid. In Sault Ste. Marie, a northern Ontario city of about 73,000, the corporations own about 200 homes, or one per cent of the housing stock, Mayor Matthew Shoemaker told CBC Hamilton. The impact has been overwhelmingly negative. 'I would be happy never to deal with these companies again,' he said. Almost half the homes they own in Sault Ste Marie are in an 'unsalvageable' state of disrepair and sit vacant, Shoemaker said."

"Fed-up residents and landlords in Colwyn Bay say their lives are being made a misery by unfinished work carried out at their privately owned properties on behalf of Conwy County Council. The situation was created when Conwy received around £3m of funding from Welsh Government in February 2021 to upgrade and modernise homes in the Colwyn Bay area. Steve Patient has lived at his maisonette on Abergele Road since 1986 and was promised around £40,000 of work, which he also says has been left incomplete, damaging his property. 'You are like a prisoner in your own home because you have to wait three years after all this work is signed off to sell; otherwise, you have to pay a load of the money back,' said Steve. 'I’m seventy-four. I’m getting too old to move. I’m going to be a lot older when I’m 77 if we decided to sell then.'"

"Deutsche Pfandbriefbank, or PBB, a German lender focused on real estate, has set aside more money for bad debts as it braces for what it says is the worst decline in commercial property values in 15 years. PBB increased its provisions for losses on loans in the fourth quarter of 2023, taking the total set aside for the year to as much as €215 million ($231.7 million), it said. 'Despite these expenses, PBB remains profitable thanks to its financial strength — even in the greatest real estate crisis since the financial crisis,' it added."

"As some of the biggest players in Western Australia's critical minerals sector ask for urgent government support, analysts say the mineral's deflated sector does not deserve a taxpayer-funded lifeline. Nickel prices have plummeted in recent months due to a glut in the market. Analyst Peter Strachan said the past 12 to 18 months had seen the nickel industry balloon to an unsustainable level. 'It's like tulip mania, really,' he said. 'We've seen so much [corporate] money just being chucked at the industry.'"

"Homeowners in Hong Kong are grappling with substantial losses at the beginning of the year as the city’s property prices have experienced a decline for eight consecutive months. The real estate market has been smothered under a softening economy and high interest rates. The recent stock market slump has further dampened market sentiment, leading flat owners who want to cash in to slash prices to secure sales, property agents say. One example is Mantin Heights in Ho Man Tin, where a three-bedroom, 865 sq ft flat recently sold for HK$15.85 million (US$2 million), equivalent to HK$18,324 per square foot. This price represents a significant drop of 38 per cent, or HK$9.62 million, from what the seller paid in September 2018."

"Additionally, 89 loss-making cases have been recorded so far this month, or 32.48 per cent of total secondary-market sales, according to Derek Chan, the head of research at property agent Ricacorp Properties. 'The Hang Seng Index once fell to below 15,000, and that hit market sentiment,' he said."

"From afar, China Evergrande Group had all the makings of a killer distressed-debt trade: $19 billion in defaulted offshore bonds; $242 billion in assets; and a government that appeared determined to prop up the country’s faltering property market. So US and European hedge funds piled into the debt, envisioning big payouts to juice their returns. What they got instead over the course of the next two years is a harsh lesson in the dangers of trying to bargain with the Communist Party. The talks are now dead — a Hong Kong court has ordered Evergrande’s liquidation, and the bonds are nearly worthless, trading in secondary markets at just 1 cent on the dollar."

"'Investors probably did not fully appreciate the risk of state intervention,' said David Knutson, chair of The Credit Roundtable, an organization of investors that works to respond to corporate actions averse to bondholders. 'Apportioning losses between domestic creditors and foreign creditors will be political.' Of course, it’s more than just Beijing’s involvement that caused Evergrande’s bonds to crater. One Evergrande adviser said that while they’re relieved the negotiations are over, how they ended has left them feeling like they wasted two years of their life. It’s a sentiment shared by many."