A report from the Star Advertiser. "A bill that seeks to give the counties the power to control short-term rentals — even phase them out— is moving in the state Legislature. Kristin Fagerback, who submitted testimony against SB 2919, said she lists a few rooms in her Big Island home for short-term rentals to help her and her mother make needs meet. 'If you put these new policies into ruling you are helping the big billion-dollar non-Hawaiian hotel businesses get more money by tourists going to their big hotels instead of going to us small hosts — which we are just trying to scrape by to survive.'"

The News Press. "Hurricane Ian’s storm surge took less than 24 hours to flood homes and rip down walls, but some Southwest Florida homeowners have waited more than 10,000 hours for their homes to be livable again. Nine residents of Naples' Vanderbilt Towers III, which stands just off the Gulf, have banded together to file an injunction against their homeowner’s association after their first-floor condos were gutted down to the studs and concrete, and then left exposed to the open air. They have remained so until January of 2024."

"'The whole first floor was wide open,' said condo owner Nancy Penoyer. Penoyer is one of the nine first-floor condo owners suing the Vanderbilt III HOA. 'You can walk condo-to-condo through the studs. The whole first floor is unlivable. I begged them to put up plywood just to close it in. They wouldn’t. They said it was too expensive.'"

The Crozet Gazette in Virginia. "At this time last year, we reported that the local and national real estate markets were 'anything but normal.' This year that perhaps changes to 'welcome to the new normal.' While sales rose, average selling price and construction costs softened slightly, a pleasant reprieve from their strong and steady advance since the start of Covid. The average price for a home across all categories dropped 5.5% to $567,000. There were 143 new construction sales during the year, up 22% over the prior year. The average sales price for all new construction homes was $588,000, down 13% in price due to the large number of less expensive townhomes that sold during the year. The price to build these new construction homes dropped 6% to $244/sqft."

From Bloomberg. "Even in the crisp afternoon sunlight, the two-bedroom Manhattan apartment has a ghostly pallor, its cracked walls yellowing like an ancient black-and-white photograph. Paint chips are falling from the ceiling. A dead pigeon lies on the kitchen floor. Its landlord, Douglas Peterson, is making a stop on a dispiriting tour of a 21-unit building he bought in 2018 for $4.8 million. Peterson’s City Skyline Realty Inc. specializes in a subgenre of real estate investment: properties subject to the New York City rent-regulation system, the oldest and biggest program in America."

"His bet on raising rents has gone disastrously bad, as it has for landlords across the city. Peterson—who’s bought more than 40 properties for $300 million over 20 years—is now in distress. He’s falling behind on his mortgages and scrambling to find money for repairs. In October, Fannie Mae, the government-backed home loan company, started foreclosure proceedings against a dozen of his properties, including the building on 164th Street. 'My career is over,' Peterson says. 'Now it’s just a question of: What’s my legacy going to be? Is it going to be that I abandoned the ship when it was sinking, or that I stayed and fought?'"

The Star Tribune in Minnesota. "Plummeting commercial real estate values prompted by the shift to remote work are causing a trickle-down financial crunch on cities, schools, park districts and other public operations that depend on tax collections. The reason: more commercial property taxes are going unpaid than at any time since the Great Recession of 2008-09. Minneapolis, for example, typically collects around 99% of taxes levied. But by the third quarter of 2023, just 97.5% of taxes levied had been collected — leaving $11 million in unpaid taxes. 'This is a big reality check,' said Park Board President Meg Forney, who noted the revenue loss comes as the Park Board is working on major capital projects and in negotiations with union park workers looking for higher pay. 'So heads up everybody, roll up your sleeves, because we have a big lift here.'"

"A deepening glut of office space is to blame. Office vacancies across the metro rose to a record 13.6% at the end of last year, according to a new report from Colliers. For most of the pandemic, downtown Minneapolis was the epicenter of the problem, but the financial pain is spreading, especially into the southern suburbs. At the end of last year, the office vacancy rate along the Interstate 494 corridor eclipsed downtown Minneapolis."

The Bakersfield Californian. "A markdown of almost $2.3 million on 1,134 acres of farmland for sale southwest of Wasco is the latest sign of how acute the buyer's market for ag property has become amid continuing water challenges, elevated interest rates and slumping commodity prices. After being listed for sale for about six months, the owners recently slashed the price by 11% in order to generate interest among potential buyers. Market observers say that price reduction — large because of the amount of land involved — is proportionally modest: Other local properties are being marked down as much as 30% lately, depending on their water situation."

"Broker Mike Ming, who represents the property in question, said sellers who held firm last year are starting to accept the fact that valuations aren't nearly as strong as they were even two years ago. 'It's not a panic yet,' he said. 'I would say it's at the first stages of the capitulation.' After peaking in 2015, largely on the strength of what were then high almond prices, ag property valuations have fallen precipitously in the last two years. Even the better positioned water districts have seen prices fall 10% or more relative to 2022 prices, noted Robb Stewart, a local farmland broker at Pearson Realty. But he said farmland with weaker districts, or properties not served by any district, have seen price drops of 20% to 30% in the last two years."

The Globe and Mail in Canada. "A sprawling real estate investment enterprise in Northern Ontario run by a former child actor has filed for creditor protection as it struggles to pay off debts of $144-million, largely from hundreds of individual private lenders including some who used retirement funds. Court records show that Robert (Robby) Clark used a network of companies to build up a rapidly expanding real estate portfolio beginning in 2020. The enterprise owns 405 rental properties in Northern Ontario cities and towns such as Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie and Timmins."

"The enterprise’s financial troubles have tied up millions of dollars loaned by hundreds of private lenders. One private lender who spoke to The Globe and Mail said she feels misled and she wasn’t kept in the loop on the scale of the operation she was lending to. 'At no time were we told that they are part of this conglomerate of all these companies. … We would never have done that,' said Cathy Hugh, 57, a retired bank employee living near Ottawa. Ms. Hugh loaned $184,000 at 8-per-cent interest in 2022 to what she believed was a sole operator to purchase a single-family home in Sault Ste. Marie. 'I only wanted to do individuals, I felt more protected because I could have gone in for a repossession.' However, the stay of proceedings issued as part of the creditor protection process means lenders cannot turn to repossession, or power of sale, to recoup their money."

"The report cites data from Canadian Real Estate Association that in December, Timmins had 285 active listings and only 39 sales, while Sault Ste. Marie had 125 sales on 425 active listings. Mr. Clark’s companies own 199 rental properties in Timmins. If they were all liquidated at once it would increase available inventory by 70 per cent, which in turn could both depress sale prices and cause the sales to take longer. The report estimates a 'controlled' sale process where 15 per cent of the properties were listed at a time would take 49 months to complete in Timmins, and 23 months in Sault Ste. Marie (where the companies own 152 properties)."

The Irish News. "UK businesses are facing the second-highest level of 'deepening' financial distress in Europe due to inflation and high interest rates. The Weil European Distress Index has shown failing profitability as the main driver for business distress across the continent. UK companies are experiencing the second-highest levels of financial distress in Europe, with German firms leading the way. Many companies have indicated they will have to reduce prices in a bid to maintain sales volumes. The European real estate sector is facing challenges such as high interest rates, falling valuations, elevated energy and construction costs, and increasingly expensive financing – cementing it as the 'most distressed sector' in the index."

"Andrew Wilkinson, senior European restructuring partner and co-head of Weil’s London restructuring practice, said: 'As the real estate sector takes the lead in distress within Europe, it’s clear that investment hesitancy and rising costs are symptoms of a larger economic malaise. High leverage poses a significant vulnerability in an unforgiving market, where companies confront rising costs against a backdrop of falling valuations.'"

From ABC News. "Major construction company St Hilliers has been placed into voluntary administration, halting work on 21 multimillion-dollar development projects around Australia. WLP Restructuring was appointed as voluntary administrator of seven entities within the Sydney-based St Hilliers group of companies on Sunday. The company's major projects include several Department of Defence contracts, along with commercial developments in Newcastle, Sydney and on the New South Wales Central Coast. Peter Lawley from the Erina-Gosford Chamber of Commerce said the collapse was 'potentially disastrous.'"

"'The plans are well advanced, the concrete's been poured and all sorts of things, so I can only imagine the administrators will be onto it straight away,' Mr Lawley said. Mr Lawley said that with 100 per cent of the units already sold, he hoped work could resume soon."

South China Morning Post. "Linda Chen, 28, sold her 70 square metre (753 sq ft) home in China's eastern Hangzhou city for a discount of about 300,000 yuan (US$41,963) and moved into a rented unit of similar size with her husband in December, after paying around 9,000 yuan in monthly mortgage payments for years. Even after several rounds of mortgage ratio cuts introduced by the authorities last year, the couple still needed to pay more than 7,000 yuan per month, which triggered their decision to sell. 'It was not an easy decision to make, but [the house] was a huge burden,' she said. 'I know we needed to sell no matter what the price.'"

"For now, the couple can bear the 4,000 yuan in rent they are paying for their new home. Chen is getting used to a new job with a lower salary after being laid off, and her husband is starting a business from scratch amid China's depressed employment market. 'Renting is more flexible and suitable for us. I won't think about buying a home for at least the next five years.'"

"'Many individual landlords, who dominate the market rather than institutional landlords, found it difficult to clinch deals for a while after putting their homes up for rent, and were forced to cut rents or else they would lose tenants,' said Li Jianlin, research director in CRIC's long-lease department. Also, they are being squeezed by cheaper rental homes backed by the government flowing into the market, Li added."

From Barron's. "'I’ve never seen people this pessimistic,' said Beijing hair stylist Wu Ming, who trades Chinese stocks on his phone when traffic in his salon is slow. 'During previous falls [in the market], there was always talk of buying the dip. No one is daring to say anything like that this time, to avoid looking like a fool.' The pessimism Wu refers to applies to the Chinese and Hong Kong stock markets, which combined have seen nearly $6 trillion wiped away from their most recent peak three years ago."

"A large proportion of Chinese citizens directly invest in its stock markets compared with the West, where professional institutional investors dominate, so there is much direct exposure to average citizens with little knowledge of the whims of the market. 'Mom-and-pop investors are the backbone of trading in China’s domestic A-shares market, so the miserable performance of the last two years is probably pushing trading volumes to very low levels,' said Doug Young, director of Hong Kong-based Bamboo Works, which analyzes listed Chinese companies. 'A-shares' refers to Chinese firms traded on the mainland bourses in Shanghai or Shenzhen."

"The market fall is, of course, tied to the overall economy’s decline and absence of recovery since the pandemic. This, in turn, is tied to a ruinous decline in the long-troubled property sector, which makes up at least a quarter of China’s economy and is the main place where average Chinese invest their savings. 'We’re probably seeing lots of such retail investors put their dwindling savings into bank accounts, of all places, as there really isn’t any other safe place to invest your money right now, considering the terrible real estate market,' he told Barron’s from Hong Kong, which featured the worst-performing major market in the world last year."