A report from the Floridian Press. "Governor Ron DeSantis has called for the Florida Legislature to modify the Condo Safety Law he signed after the Surfside tragedy of 2021 to ease the financial burden on condo owners. Since the Law was signed, horror stories of Florida residents, including seniors, facing six-figure special assessments have emerged. Aventura condo owner Judith Weinberg said she currently is paying three special assessments and may be facing a fourth. 'They are hard. They are challenging,' said Weinberg. 'Many of us are semi-retired. It is challenging and I will leave it at that.' Weinberg feels confident the law can be modified to ease the burden on her and others in her situation. 'I think if we stick together maybe we can do something to address the issue and make it more reasonable,' said Weinberg."

The Aspen Times in Colorado. "Most sellers are beginning to see the writing on the wall but are stubbornly ignoring the obvious, hoping the party that started in June of 2020 isn’t quite over. They’re wishing there’s time for one more drink or another lap around the dance floor before the lights come up and the bouncer shows them the door. But at this point, there’s clear evidence of a significant shift. When sellers aren’t sure what to ask for and buyers don’t want to get caught at the top of the market, we see stagnation."

"At the end of the day, it’s guys like me to inform clients of this new dynamic and to work to bridge the gap to close deals. The only way to do that is by encouraging seller price reductions and convincing buyers that offers less than asking price are not a waste of time. The deals are there for those willing to acknowledge the new state of play and come to the middle rather than digging in or not making the attempt. Not doing so is the same as believing in fairies, elves, and bunnies who lay eggs."

The Durango Herald in Colorodo. "Durango Area Association of Realtors’ quarterly real estate statistics show that La Plata County residential real estate was down 29 units, or 8.1%, from the second quarter of last year. According to DAAR’s data, the median cost of Durango Mountain homes – those around Purgatory Resort – dropped from just over $2.1 million to around $1.5 million since second quarter 2023. But John Wells, owner of The Wells Group, noted Durango Mountain home and Durango Mountain condominium numbers are a bit skewed based on the number of units sold. 'It’s way off because it such a small number of units,' he said. Durango condos and townhomes saw an 18.1% decrease in median price during second quarter 2024, which again is reflected by the price of the condos sold not the value of condos in general, he said."

Beat of Hawaii. "This week’s unanimous vote by the Maui County Planning Commission to endorse banning 7,000 purpose-built short-term vacation rentals had intense debate, beyond what we expected. It also brought to the surface issues of racism, xenophobia, and hatred. Some community members argue that the push to eliminate these short-term rentals is driven by anti-tourist sentiment that also unfairly targets non-resident owners, many of whom are from the mainland or international backgrounds. One commenter noted, 'This move will not create any more long term rentals… It simply means the current owners will need to cheat or find a loop-hole.' Another said, 'Locals want something for nothing, and the visitors who would love to be appreciated are treated like trespassers.'"

The Independent. "A Nevada business owner says he is concerned about squatters causing damage to a Las Vegas-area high-rise building where construction halted last year. Jeremy Day, owner of neighboring business Freak’s Tattoo Emporium, is working to keep The Watermark, a mixed-use apartment building in Downtown Henderson, clean. He’s complained about how alleged squatters have pried the fence posts open in front of the building. Day has struggled to locate the property’s owner. The man is not financially attached to the building but is worried that the squatters may cause fires that’ll reach his business."

"'I’m worried as time goes on, it gets out cold, they’re going to light fires or something,' he said. 'I’ve had multiple confrontations where I’ve actually told them, they need to leave the property. They’re in the parking garage, as far as I know, but they’re in there all the time.' Construction on the building stalled in December when contractors walked off the job. There are around $16m in liens against the property."

KMPH in California. "Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer is now introducing a new city ordinance, banning homeless encampments on private and public properties. 'During the past few years, the City has provided additional homeless resources and services such as restrooms, showers, medical and dental services,' said Councilmember Miguel Arias. 'Yet we have individuals who refuse help, who destroy neighborhoods, and engage in criminal activities near our sensitive uses. Our residents and businesses are fed up. It is time we hold those who refuse help to be held accountable.'"

CBS Bay Area in California. "Burglars kicked down doors and ransacked 16 small businesses in East Oakland's troubled Hegenberger corridor. All the affected businesses are located inside an office building at 8055 Collins Drive, which is situated right behind the Denny's Restaurant that shut down earlier this year citing crime. The building co-owner and community activist Ken Houston said the thieves cut through two layers of fencing to get into the property around 2:30 a.m. Saturday morning. Surveillance footage showed multiple thieves kicking down doors once inside. he businesses range from construction to a barber shop. 'They kicked this one open, and this tenant just moved in here. You can see her boxes, she's just moving in. So you think she's going to want to stay here with this happening to her? I don't think so,' said Houston."

The Boston Herald. "A Massachusetts housing attorney says residents’ fears over migrants being housed in a proposed family homeless shelter in a Cape Cod town, triggering a request for opposition from a regional board, are unfounded. The Cape Cod Commission has found the project, which looks to convert a former nursing home into a 'family transitional shelter' in Dennis would have no regional impact, denying a discretionary referral from the towns of Dennis and Harwich. Dennis Planning Board Chairman Paul McCormick Jr., during a May 20 hearing, called putting in a condition that the use of the shelter be for only U.S. citizens a 'fair suggestion.'"

"The proposed family homeless facility on Cape Cod would be funded through the state’s emergency housing assistance program, which runs shelters that have been used to house migrants. Homeless families and individuals would receive lessons at the facility on 'life skills,' to get them permanent housing in the future, project leaders had said. 'We need to have shelter for our homeless people as housing becomes more and more difficult,' said Peter Okun, a commission board member from Provincetown. 'We need to get people off the street, we need to teach them how to fend for themselves.'"

CBC New in Canada. "According to Landlord and Tenant Board data, applications for own-use evictions — which can be used when the landlord or a family member needs to move into the unit — are up 85 per cent in Ontario since 2020, rising from 3,445 that year to 6,376 in 2023. Board data also show that T5 applications — when a tenant wants to dispute the own-use claim — quadrupled from 2020 to 2023. Some small landlords and landlord advocates say that the issue is an increase in landlords actually needing their properties back, often because of higher interest rates. 'If you have to pay $800 a month for your rental property, and then your mortgage needs to be renewed for your principal residence and you have to pay another $600 or $800 for that, you can't afford it,' said Rose Marie, vice-chair of Small Ownership Landlords of Ontario (SOLO), a landlord advocacy group. 'You can't just pass that monthly increase over to the tenant. So then who's paying it?'"

"At a recent SOLO protest at Queen's Park in Toronto, several landlords protested the delays at the Landlord and Tenant Board in dealing with tenants fighting their N12 eviction notices. 'I am a single mom, I cannot afford this, I have to move back into my house and I cannot,' landlord Jessica Huang said through tears. Her issue, she said, is as Marie laid it out: once mortgage rates went up, she could no longer afford the rental property. Now, she needs to move in instead and can't."

The Globe and Mail in Canada. "4483 Cove Cliff Rd., North Vancouver, B.C. Asking price: $1,798,800 (Feb. 11). Selling price: $2,150,000 (Feb. 27). The 102-year-old cottage had undergone updates and has a lot of exposed wood and craftsmanship on the interior. There’s also a detached suite, office studio as well as RV parking on the property. Listing agent Patricia Houlihan got a few offers on the house and the sellers accepted the highest one. 'The market was going crazy,' she says of the first quarter, when there was little inventory and a lot of demand. Although the first part of the year was a frenzy, it quickly cooled by spring. Now, it’s a buyers’ market, says Ms. Houlihan."

"'You are way better off to buy right now because if rates come down everybody will bid prices up again,' she says. 'There is opportunity to buy without competing; a lot of choice because of way too many listings for buyers out there; and they can control what’s going on, they can make lower offers. There are tons of subject-to-sales now.'"

Business Live in the UK. "Insolvency specialists handling the affairs of a failed Newcastle student accommodation landlord say the firm's lender is unlikely to recover £11.7m owed to it, in full. The administration of three companies within the Bricks Capital Group, which were behind the city's Glassworks block, has been extended for another year as staff at Interpath continue to investigate assets and debt. Newcastle Glassworks Limited, Newcastle Glassworks Management Limited and Bricks K5 Capital Ltd - which developed and managed the 270-bed Glassworks property in Ouseburn - all entered administration in July 2022 following unpaid debt owed to a Hong Kong lender CIMC Financial Leasing, which also owns a company that provided the prefabricated shipping containers used in its construction."

"The underperformance of the Glassworks block had been blamed on an oversupply of student accommodation in Newcastle, with Interpath having issued a report in 2022 which said: 'Developers and investors capitalised on the large number of students and the reputation of the city resulting in a significant and rapid increase in supply. Some reports suggest that, by 2017, Newcastle had the highest rate of student housing in the entire country, with one in every 15 homes being a student property, some 10 times higher than the national average for local authorities in the UK. Given the high level of supply, the group experienced significant downwards pressure on rents to attract tenants, particularly given the property's peripheral location and relative lack of amenities.'"

ABC News in Australia. "For almost a decade, pensioners Trish Reece and her husband Wayne have been living in a gated village in Shepparton in regional Victoria, run by the controversial land lease operator Lifestyle Communities. Now they want to get out. 'We don't want to live here anymore,' she says. But she says they are stuck, financially, due to the so-called exit fees charged by the company when a resident sells their home. For a house that sells for $500,000, Lifestyle can take up to $100,000 in exit fees after five years. 'We're just vegetables waiting to pop off the perch so they can collect their exit fee,' Trish says."

"The stories generated a flood of messages to the ABC from residents not just in Lifestyle villages but other land lease communities across Australia. Trish Reece is one of them. When they eventually sold their home in the community and moved into Gwenda's, the company made it clear they would have to pay two exit fees, which disappointed them, but Trish says she was unwell at the time and didn't fight it. All up, Lifestyle deducted $104,831 in exit fees, rent and selling fees, leaving them with $180,168. When they sell the place they are currently in they will face a third exit fee. 'They were underhanded, greedy,' she says. 'We would have been better off financially if we stayed in the original home because we wouldn't be up for three sets of exit fees,' she says. 'It's so much of a chunk of our retirement savings gone … we'll have to be carried out of here in a box. We can't leave.'"

"Another person told the ABC that Lifestyle had charged a relative a 0.5 per cent handling fee and 2.5 per cent selling agent commission totalling $18,000 despite the relative finding the buyer and introducing the buyer to the Lifestyle agent. 'It was a friend of a friend who wanted to get into that particular site,' he said. He said the exit fee cost tens of thousands of dollars to 'get out of their clutches.' 'She has the psychological scar of feeling like a complete idiot for ever going there in the first place,' he said."

South China Morning Post. "For Raymond Tsoi, Hong Kong's current property slump feels like deja vu. The veteran investor and chairman of Asia Property Holdings, best known for his part in the HK$40.2 billion (US$5.2 billion) takeover of the world's most expensive office tower, lost HK$4 million in 1998 when he sold sell two flats at half their purchase price because of collapsing asset prices during the Asian Financial Crisis. Tsoi had paid about HK$11,000 per square foot for two apartments at Laguna Verde in Hung Hom, only for the developers CK Asset Holdings and CLP Holdings to slash prices by a third to HK$7,000 per sq ft within a year."

"That was just the start. CK Asset, known as Cheung Kong Property Holdings until it was renamed, would later send a jolt through the market when it priced the Tierra Verde project in Tsing Yi at HK$4,147 per sq ft, below the market average. While that tactic helped the developer sell all 1,400 flats on the first day, it became the opening salvo of a price war that would crimp 70 per cent of Hong Kong's median home price, a crash so severe that recovery took six years. Tsoi said he sees history repeating in the topsy turvy market. Major developers like CK Asset had lavished discounts since the start of the year, driving prices down by about 25 per cent from their September 2021 peak. 'What we are seeing now is similar' to the collapse in the late 1990s, Tsoi said in an interview with the Post. 'The slowdown in transactions had started since 2019, and developers had joined the price war in the first half of this year to offload their inventory.'"

"The discount war is taking place amid a housing glut in the city. Developers launched 9,419 new homes in the first half, equal to 87.6 per cent of the total flats sold in the whole of last year, according to data compiled by CBRE. Most of this year's new launches took place in the four months after Hong Kong's government scrapping a decade-old stamp duty in February. The spurt was short-lived though, as newly built homes that were delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic subsequently came to completion, or were launched anew. The housing supply pipeline may expand to 109,000 homes over the next three to four years, according to the forecast by the government's Housing Bureau."

"Developers rushed to launch, and then outdid each other with discounts to attract buyers. CK Asset, ever the trend setter in Hong Kong's property market, in late March launched the first 138 flats at its Blue Coast project in Wong Chuk Hang at a 20 per cent discount to its development cost. That first batch sold out, with 65 bidders vying for every available unit. That record turnout emboldened other developers to replicate the discounts. All told, the average prices of new launches across the city this year had been about 15 per cent cheaper than previous sales in the same neighbourhood, according to analysts."

"'We are still facing an abundant supply of new flats in the short term,' said Norry Lee, JLL's senior director of project strategy in Hong Kong. About 40,000 new homes are available this year, comprising 23,000 existing units in the market, and another 20,000 units which will be ready to launch, Lee said. 'Prices will only stabilise when the [inventory] drops to around 20,000 units,' as that means developers have offloaded to a sufficiently comfortable cash position to resume raising prices, Lee said. Some Hong Kong developers are even resorting to stealth discounts, offering cash rebates of up to 50 per cent."