A report from Vail Daily in Colorado. "If Eagle County’s 2023 real estate dollar volume had immediately followed 2019, it would have been a new record. Instead, it represents a significant drop from the pandemic years. Meanwhile, the number of transactions has been declining even more. The days are over for cash offers with no appraisals or inspections. 'Buyers are much more critical,' said. 'They’re not willing to settle for just anything.' That’s more in line with the market in 2019, he noted."

The New York Post. "For home hunters dead set on targeting pecunious Palm Beach, there is some relief in sight. 'We’ve had this frenzy of prices more than doubling over the last four years,' said Jonathan Miller, CEO of appraisal firm Miller Samuel. The good news? 'Now we’re seeing pricing stabilize.' The onslaught of northeasterners, who swarmed South Florida during the pandemic in search of suntans and tax breaks, has slowed. Why are we seeing price relief in the first place? The answer, according to Douglas Elliman broker Cara Coniglio McClure, boils down to sentiment. The 'emotional component' that drove the market throughout the peak of the pandemic 'has been taken out,' she said. 'Now, it’s shifted to just a normal, healthy market where the buyers have a little bit more power.'"

Action News Jax in Florida. "Downtown neighbors are frustrated by another roadblock for the longtime troubled site of the Berkman Plaza II. The developer behind the property filed for bankruptcy Friday, which puts a planned public auction on hold. Park Beeler, the owner of PB Riverfront Revitalization, had a plan that included a 42-floor skyscraper with hundreds of apartments, townhouses, and mixed-use on the first floor. Now Beeler is one of several that owes the property owner, Choate Construction, more than $5 million. Action News Jax Robert Grant dug through court records and found a history of evictions, foreclosures, and contract disputes listing Beeler as the defendant. Previously Action News Jax reported on Beeler’s prison time."

The East Valley Tribune in Arizona. "Work has stopped again at The GRID in downtown Mesa, a ballyhooed apartment and commercial complex next to Benedictine University on Main Street. Developer Palladium Enterprises, a partnership between Tony Wall, Karrin Taylor Robson and Trevor Barger, entered into an agreement with Mesa to build the project on city-owned land in 2017. It's at least the second time The GRID has had a work stoppage and the third time the developers have faced financial issues. Two subcontractors who worked on The GRID in the past year said they stopped receiving payments in October before work stopped in January. Both companies, small Valley businesses, are each owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cassandra Olivarez, a project manager for Joe Lopez LLC, said in an email that Palladium's failure to pay has been 'nothing short of distressing, placing our business in an extremely precarious position.'"

The Real Deal. "CA Ventures’ problems have migrated to the Texas Triangle. The company defaulted on a $72.1 million loan on one of its senior living facilities, Anthology of Tanglewood, at 504 Bering Drive in Houston. The property was auctioned at foreclosure earlier this month, according to Roddy’s Foreclosure Listing Service. An entity of the lender, Acore Capital, won control. CA Ventures has no shortage of other headaches. CEO Tom Scott said in December that the Chicago-based developer is in 'deleverage mode.' It is selling off multifamily assets and facing lawsuits from a lender, a group of investors and even a former executive. The company has attributed many of its problems to market-wide conditions. 'It’s been a tumultuous two years,' Scott said in the same interview. 'It’s tough on everybody in the real estate world, everybody.'"

From Bisnow. "As landlords struggle to navigate New York regulations and as loans backed by multifamily become increasingly at risk, some owners are attempting to make a dash from the asset class before their day of reckoning comes. To most, acquiring apartments or building new no longer makes sense since the expiration of the 421-a tax abatement. Values for rent-stabilized apartments have substantially fallen from 2015 peak pricing, down an average of 18% across the five boroughs and as much as 51% in northern Manhattan, according to the report. That is attributed to the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which eliminated landlords’ ability to raise rents by 20% when stabilized units become vacant and reduced the renovation costs that owners can recover to just $15K over 15 years, causing many apartments to sit empty after tenants move out. The panel of real estate executives described sellers as 'capitulators,' 'losers' and 'taking a hit' in this environment."

From Bloomberg. "California’s newest state Senate president is only 44 but an old-school throwback: Mike McGuire climbed the political ladder by winning elections to the school board, mayor and county government and with a granular focus on bread-and-butter constituent issues. His profile grew after the Tubbs wildfire in 2017 devastated property owners and renters in his Northern California district. McGuire led the push to make insurers more responsive. Caught in the middle are people like McGuire’s constituents—shop owners and homebuyers scouring for a policy to satisfy their mortgage holder, and forced to flock in spiraling numbers to the state’s costly insurance program of last resort. 'I can’t walk down the street without people telling me they got non-renewed or they lost their home,' McGuire, a Democrat, said in an interview."

"Kimberly Lilley, who works with an organization that represents condo associations around the country, said she sold her own condo in Los Angeles just in time to avoid staggering insurance rate increases there. The increases hitting condo associations are being passed to residents, she said, a trend that’s not sustainable. 'This is the next housing crisis,' Lilley said."

The Kitsap Sun. "For two decades, Franklin County — an agricultural community of about 100,000 in south-central Washington — has been the fastest-growing county in the state. But lately, county leaders have been scrambling to pay their bills. And this year? They’ll need to cut another 15% from the general fund. 'We’re out of cash. We don’t have any money left,' said Franklin County Administrator Mike Gonzalez. 'That part is a part that keeps me up at night. You’re like, ‘Holy cow, if we really got into a pickle, how are we going to pay for all this?’ Counties across Washington, of all sizes, are on the same kind of financial precipice. Many county officials blame the handcuffs that the Legislature has put on property taxes, their most crucial revenue source."

"'They’ve been holding things together with chewing gum and baling wire for the last few decades,' state Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, said of local county governments. 'The ways that they learned to do that just stopped working in a high-inflation environment.' Yet the state, county leaders say, not only hasn’t been able to pass legislation to fix the problem, it’s made things worse by heaping on new responsibilities with little extra aid. 'The financial system is collapsing, and we in the counties have been left to hold the bag,' Gonzalez said. 'We’re collapsing and the state is not doing anything about it but waiting and watching the system implode.'"

CBC News in Canada. "An investigation report by the City of Edmonton has found that the construction of a condo building evacuated due to structural problems in September did not align with design drawings, confirming what engineers determined last year. The city investigated the safety code permitting process for the design and construction phases between 1999 and 2000 for Castledowns Pointe, an 83-unit condo building at 12618 152nd Ave. Residents were ordered out of the building in September after engineers from Read Jones Christoffersen Ltd. (RJC) investigating damage from a March 2023 fire discovered portions of the structure were significantly overstressed."

"Lisa Brown, who owns a condo at Castledowns Pointe, has read the investigation report and city council memo. She said she continues to have more questions than answers — especially about who was responsible for making sure the building was structurally sound. 'Nothing makes sense to me with this,' she said. Brown, who has owned a unit in the building since 2008, says she and other owners are living through the 'worst-case-scenario' of homeownership. Brown said she and other residents are living through the worst-case-scenario of home ownership, facing extra housing costs, thousands of dollars in fees, and even foreclosures. 'Not a single one of the 83 unit owners is not suffering significantly right now,' she said."

ABC News in Australia. "When Tracey Kokden paid the deposit on a one-bedroom apartment in a new development in Wollongong she was thrilled to think about the day she and her teenage daughter would move in. Ms Kokden is one of scores of buyers in Oxford Crown Group's Crownview apartment development left in limbo as the NSW Building Commissioner seeks to rectify numerous issues. The buyers are unable to move in and unable to get their deposits back while the remediation works are carried out. In early 2022, Ms Kokden paid a 5 per cent deposit on a $560,000 one-bedroom/study apartment on the fourth floor of the 149-unit complex on Crown Street where she planned to live with her teenage daughter."

"She was originally set to move into the unit in July 2022, but was told due to COVID, the timeline had blown out to December 2022. More changes to the sunset dates – or the date stipulated in the contract for completion of the building – followed as a result of the intervention of the NSW Building Commissioner who identified significant issues, including structural defects. In addition to her deposit, Ms Kokden has paid $21,000 in stamp duty and continues to pay $500 a month for a storage unit. 'It has been a nightmare. I have had many a night where I have just cried myself to sleep,' she said."

South China Morning Post. "Hong Kong home prices in February fell for the 10th month to the lowest level in seven and a half years, after a sharper than expected month-on-month slump. With interest rates in the city at a more than 22-year-high, developers have been aggressively pricing flats in new projects at multi-year lows, making them more attractive to potential buyers. Home prices have lost a cumulative 13.7 per cent since April 2023."