It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Mountain Green condo owners voted in favor of a $50 million assessment to bring the building into the 21st Century, but some longtime owners said their quarterly payments will be so high they can’t afford it and they will be forced out. Helen Werns, who retired last March, said she has to go back to work to afford her condo. She has owned her 750-square-foot unit for 30 years. The assessment will cost her about $7,000 a quarter. Her mortgage will be paid off this year, but the assessment will cost her $200,000 in the end. 'It’s just like buying a new condo,' she said. 'I was planning to leave this condo in a body bag. I don’t know how that’s all going to work now.' Many owners are trying to sell their condos. There were 24 units on the market at the end of March. Havlicek and others are concerned their condos won’t sell, leaving her no options."

"Representing Asheville-area brokers, Land of the Sky Association of Realtors has partnered with the North Carolina Realtors Association to fund a media campaign meant to challenge a potential ban on short-term vacation rentals. Chip Craig founded Greybeard in 1999. The real estate management company employs over 100 full- and part-time workers and manages 500 long-term rentals and 250 short-term vacation rentals. Craig and other realtors maintain that banning future STRs will impact the area in a multitude of ways. 'It won’t be immediate,' said Craig. 'But they will kill our economy.'"

"You may have seen the signs of discontent. Literally, yard signs that say, 'This is a single family home neighborhood. Short term vacation rentals not welcome here.' 'They have been a problem since the start of it, I’m talking 2009 and 10,' said Terry Cantrell, who lives in Hollywood Lakes, where there are at least a dozen short-term rental properties in the neighborhood. 'For our neighborhood, it’s noise, safety issues, because we have children and dogs, and they speed all over the place, they drink, and it’s just horrible,' said Denise Reiter, standing on her front porch in the Floranada neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale. Reiter said there are eight short-term rental homes in her immediate neighborhood. Last month, a man was shot and killed at one of them, and it happened next door to Reiter’s house. It’s one of at least 38 shootings at vacation rental homes in Florida since 2019."

"During a debate on the bill in the Florida Senate, Sen. Jason Pizzo asked why hotels are empowered to deal with problems while neighborhoods have no recourse when it comes to homes essentially becoming hotels. 'And a hotel wouldn’t put up with it for 15 minutes, the loitering and lingering and drunkenness and drugs and pornographic films being shot in the backyard, poolside, where every other neighbor can see it as it’s going on, a hotel wouldn’t allow it, so my constituents want to know why it’s allowed in their neighborhood,' Pizzo said."

"Just in time for the summer season, a massive oceanfront Hamptons estate is unofficially on the market for $85 to $90 million. The seller is Barton 'Mark' Perlbinder, a third-generation New York real estate scion. The Sagaponack home, at 635 Daniels Lane, sits on 5.1 acres. Insiders say that Mark Perlbinder is in a bind and needs to sell. Others say it’s just time — and the price is now more 'realistic.' That’s because the house was asking a grand $150 million last year in what’s known as a 'pocket' or 'whisper' listing, meaning it’s not publicly listed for sale. 'Like now, that number was never written anywhere, but that’s the number that was circulating,' an insider said. 'Now it’s time to sell the house and move on. It came time for a serious conversation for finding a buyer and coming up with a more realistic price.' Perlbinder’s 'legal and financial woes' include a 2014 arrest for allegedly picking up cocaine and illegal prescription drugs in the Hamptons, according to reports."

"Modular homebuilding startup Veev, which is on the verge of shutting down, has allegedly defaulted on a planned 50-unit apartment complex in San Francisco’s Mission District. The Hayward-based company, which reached unicorn status in 2022, is accused of falling behind on loan payments for 1721 15th Street in Mission Dolores. The project was proposed as a three-property prefabricated housing complex that would replace the former location of Jay’s Auto Body Center. The biggest piece of the assemblage was a six-story, 46-unit building along 15th Street, according to a previous report from Mission Local. The alleged default comes just months after the company informed staff of its impending closure. In a statement published in Calcalist, the company attributed the closure to a sudden cancellation of a capital-raising initiative. The company’s fortunes have soured compared to just two years ago, when it raised $400 million in a Series D round to reach unicorn status. Since it was founded in 2008, the firm has raised a total of $600 million."

"California’s unemployment rate was the nation’s highest in February, as the high cost of living and the loss of construction, machinery and agriculture jobs hit hard. The state’s jobless rate in February, the latest data available, was 5.3%, up from 5.2% in January and 4.5% a year earlier. 'Tech used to be the workhorse of the state’s economy. It is no longer true,' said Sung Won Sohn, president of SS Economics in Los Angeles. 'California is at the leading edge of the national economic slowdown.'"

"While the effects of the pandemic on private sector office usage have become increasingly clear, the future of the federal footprint is still largely up in the air. Federal government agencies are using just 12% of the space in their headquarters buildings on average. 'It shows that those decisions are not getting made,' Dan Mathews, who oversaw the federal government’s real estate portfolio under the Trump administration and is now a member of the PBRB, said of the report. 'The buildings are mostly empty.' Last year, the Patent and Trademark Office vacated two of its five buildings in Alexandria, reducing its footprint from 2.4M SF to 1.6M SF. The National Labor Relations Board is planning to cut its 153K SF in D.C.’s Navy Yard area by at least 40% when its lease expires in 2025. The Department of Justice sent out a solicitation that sought to reduce 150K SF of its office space at NoMa’s Constitution Square in 2025."

"Mary Walker said she got a 'bit of shock' when she opened up a piece of mail from the City of Toronto last month, informing her that she owed more than $2,500 in taxes for the 'vacant' Scarborough condo where she currently resides. She said she was hit with the unexpected tax bill after she failed to make her Vacant Home Tax declaration for 2023 and the city deemed her condo unoccupied. Walker is one of many Toronto homeowners who now find themselves in a similar situation. Sophie Lem, a Riverdale resident, said she too was unaware that the declaration had to be made every year. Last month, she said she received a Vacant Home Tax bill for more than $12,000. 'I’m just furious, and I’m upset, and distressed at the same time,' she said."

"It was to be their dream home. Rosy and Michael McGrowder were packing up to move into their new 2,600-square-foot custom-built house when they got a call that would roil their lives and cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. On the phone that October 2022 day was a lender for their builder. The McGrowders were told if they wanted to close on the sale of their home the following week, they’d have to pay an additional $300,000 — one-third of their original purchase price. The builder, Mike Bettiol of Mariman Homes, had defaulted on payments to his mortgage holders, the lender told them. To try to recoup costs, his lenders were looking to get a higher price for the McGrowders’ newly completed home in the Hunter Estates subdivision in Scotland, Ont., a 21-lot slice of serenity in a small community 20 kilometres southwest of Brantford."

"It was a sickening feeling, Rosy said. 'We were just in a very depressed state.' It turns out, they weren’t alone. 'He messed up our life,' said Rosy, with Michael adding that moving into their dream home was 'nothing short of a nightmare.' Because the McGrowders were building their 'dream home,' they spent an additional $120,000 over and above the purchase price for custom upgrades. This was paid upfront to Mariman Homes and the cabinetry company, Michael said. Walking away would have meant forfeiting that — not to mention thousands of dollars worth of fixtures and appliances they had already moved into the house — including a hot water heater, spa bidet toilets, exterior door locks and light fixtures, which they were skeptical they’d get back. 'So that would have put us out quite a bit,' Rosy said."

"Today, Hunter Estates is a patchwork of nine beautiful homes, dotted among empty, overgrown lots in the stalled development. 'It’s like we’re living in an abandoned area,' Rosy told The Spectator."

"Louth County Council will not be buying five houses that didn’t sell under the affordable purchase scheme at the Cois Farraige development at Blackrock for social housing, councillors were told at the April meeting of Dundalk Municipal Distriction. Ten houses in the development had been available under the affordable purchase scheme for first-time buyers and others who cannot afford a mortgage to buy a house at its market rate. While there had been eleven applications for people interested in the scheme, only five houses were eventually sold. The unsold houses will now revert to the developer to sell on the open market, Senior Executive Officer John Lawrence said."

"Cllr Marianne Butler recalled that after the crash, the Council had ended up buying affordable houses and using them for social housing. She wondered if there was 'any chance that we could buy these and use them as social housing.' 'We’re not going to do that,' replied Mr Lawrence. He said that in the past when the Council had looked to acquire property and sell it on as social housing, it had caused a lot of unhappiness that they had bought units that they couldn’t sell."