A report from the Gazette Journal in Nevada. "On Aug. 17, the National Association of Realtors will implement changes that its members must follow as part of a sweeping $418 million settlement over its practices. One potential concern from the Consumer Federation of America is whether the new written agreements actually force buyers to become legally bound to pay for commissions, especially if they end up signing agreements that they do not fully understand. 'Everything is loaded in the industry’s favor in the contracts,' said Stephen Brobeck, a senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America. 'No consumer has a chance. You don’t have a chance and I don’t have a chance.' One of the biggest effects of the lawsuits and ensuing settlements is that they caught the attention of the average person, according to Brobeck. It put commissions on people’s radar. 'When consumers don’t know what’s going on, unethical agents get away with murder,' Brobeck said."

"Brobeck cited the new contracts from the California Association of Realtors, which were done in response to NAR requiring agents to obtain buyer signatures on buyer representation contracts starting in August. In addition to being written in a way that is hard to understand, the changes being initiated in California essentially obligate the buyer to pay the buyer agent, Brobeck said. 'Everything is loaded in the industry’s favor in the contracts,' Brobeck said. 'They’re terrible and we’re recommending consumers not sign them.'"

"In Reno-Sparks, the ratio of agents to available homes for sale is even tighter. Last year, the area saw about 4200 home sales, according to Beau Keenan, owner of Dickson Realty, a real estate company that operates in Northern Nevada and Northern California. In contrast, the market has about 3,200 real estate agents. Assuming that each home sale uses two agents as well, it translates to less than three homes per agent. The commission that agents get also shrink further when factoring in compensation for their brokers plus referral fees from real estate services such as Zillow, Redfin or OpCity that can siphon between 25% to 35% of their commission. 'You need to sell 10 to 12 homes a year to make a living out of it,' Keenan said. 'So that just goes to show you how many people are not making a living (with real estate).' Recently, Brobeck surveyed 2,000 agents who worked for big companies. Half of them had either one sale or no sales at all in the past year, Brobeck found. 'There’s a huge glut of agents,' Brobeck said. 'They’re desperate for clients and sales.'"

The Louisiana Illuminator. "Louisiana homeowners will no longer have the assurance of holding onto their longtime property insurance policies after a damaging storm. And they could start seeing increases in premiums and deductibles since the state’s insurance commissioner convinced lawmakers to deregulate Louisiana’s insurance industry. Last year, Jamie Lafollette, a 35-year-old from Santa Cruz, California received the upsetting news that State Farm was not renewing the policy she and her husband had on their home for the previous 10 years. They had never made a claim. Lafollette had been paying about $2,000 a year to insure their home. When she sought a new estimate, she was confronted with annual insurance rates of more than $20,000 a year."

"'We’re panicking and we’re frustrated, because we’ve been working so hard to make our properties and our community fire safe,' Lafollette said. 'The insurance companies don’t look at individual properties. They’re just looking at a category on a map. So it doesn’t matter if you’ve clear-cut your property or you’ve done all the work to make your property safe.'"

"Andreanecia Morris, executive director for HousingNOLA, said the changes could lead to more foreclosures or homeowners going without insurance because they can’t afford it. 'We’re looking at construction projects grinding to a halt. We’re looking at record homelessness and displacement,' she said. 'We’re looking at homes not being able to be bought or sold because people can’t get insurance policies, while people are rushing to sell their houses.'"

Des Moines Register in Iowa. "By the time Johnston developer Daniel Pettit was locked up in January for contempt in connection with three civil court cases, a wide web of people in several states had accused the one-time millionaire of fraud. Pettit, 44, already had gone on the run for a month instead of reporting to jail in November, and had been accused of lying to a judge, ignoring court orders and subpoenas for financial records, taking steps to hide money and assets from people he owed and trying to fraudulently give away valuable West Des Moines development land.But on June 17, he was released early after serving just over five months of a six-month sentence, bewildering people who are knee-deep in costly lawsuits and missing large sums of money."

"On Thursday, there were no visible signs of guards at Pettit’s North Liberty home, where he appeared at the front door in the presence of one of his two grown sons. Pettit declined to be interviewed and said he had no comment on the more than $70 million in defaults, judgments and liens against him or allegations of fraud by many of his one-time business partners or investors, including a couple he allegedly swindled out of $60,000 after their son's death from a fentanyl overdose. More than a dozen other lawsuits involving Pettit and corporations he created are still wending their way through the courts."

"Pettit, who purported to have a deep Christian faith and founded a faith-based nonprofit called Trailhead International Builders, had successful developments before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. But by 2020, lenders had begun to foreclose on properties in which he was involved, court records show. He also took money from investors for projects that didn't materialize, and some of those investors knew nothing about others involved, court records and interviews showed. 'There should be charges,' said Des Moines attorney Samuel Marks, who has represented Pettit’s ex-wife in a bankruptcy filing after she was named as a co-defendant in almost a dozen lawsuits tied to her husband's investment schemes. 'They should have arrested him the minute he walked out of jail. But they didn’t.'"

The Houston Chronicle in Texas. "In another blow to Greenway Plaza, a prominent yet financially struggling mixed-use campus in Houston, a key longtime tenant is poised to relocate its headquarters to a landmark Galleria-area skyscraper next year. A court receiver appointed to manage the property had been trying to shore up leasing at Greenway while also preparing it for a potential sale, according to earlier Bloomberg delinquency notes. A chronic oversupply of outdated office space in Houston has kept the region's overall office vacancy rate at about 26% in the second quarter, according to Avison Young. Houston’s office leasing activity in the second quarter was 36% below levels typically seen pre-pandemic."

"'Landlords are motivated to strike deals, but some are finding it difficult to provide tenant incentives such as improvement packages and rent abatements due to underlying building loans or financial limitations,' said Wade Bowlin, principal and managing director of Avison Young’s Houston office."

The San Francisco Chronicle in California. "It’s not just San Francisco struggling to refill its offices. Vacancies in San Mateo County continue to rise, increasing to more than twice its pre-pandemic rate, according to a new report from brokerage Kidder Mathews, which showed the direct vacancy rate for San Mateo County’s office market was about 17% at the end of June 2024, up from 7.8% in 2019 and 15% in 2023. The 'oversupplied market' has also significantly slowed office construction, the brokerage added, as have higher interest rates and a slowdown of pre-leasing activity. It’s not just new construction that’s contributing to San Mateo County’s rising vacancy rate. The county saw about 580,000 square feet of negative net absorption, or occupancy loss, in the first half of 2024, though that was lower than the loss of 810,000 square feet for the same period in 2023. Despite the glut of available space, San Mateo County’s office vacancy rates aren’t as high as San Francisco’s, where brokerages have estimated total rates at 37%."

The Real Deal. "Few real estate investors helped fuel the frenzy of the 2010s quite like Ivanhoé Cambridge — and few are staring down today’s aftershocks like the major Canadian investor. Over the last decade, the real estate arm of Quebec’s $300 billion pension fund tore through U.S. cities, paying top dollar to buy trophy properties. In New York, it paid $2.2 billion in 2015 to buy the 1.2 million-square-foot 3 Bryant Park — at the time the second most-expensive office purchase ever in the U.S. — and acquired the News Corp.-anchored 1211 Sixth Avenue for $1.8 billion. In 2015 it also teamed up with the Blackstone Group to buy Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village for $5.3 billion."

"Now, nearly $5 billion worth of debt on those properties is set to mature over a 12-month span starting next year. It’ll be a big test for how prime properties bought at the height of the market fare in today’s challenging refi environment. In her interview with CNBC, CEO Nathalie Palladitcheff acknowledged the challenges that come today with refinancing. 'Office was bad already at the beginning of the pandemic,' she said. 'It’s not just about bad assets; it’s also about bad liabilities. So when you have bad on both sides, it’s where the problem starts.'"

CTV News in Canada. "The provincial regulator responsible for policing B.C.'s real estate industry has ordered a former Realtor to pay $130,000 and cancelled her licence after determining that she committed a variety of professional misconduct. Rashin Rohani surrendered her licence in December 2023, but the BC Financial Services Authority's chief hearing officer Andrew Pendray determined that it should nevertheless be cancelled as a signal to other licensees that 'repetitive participation in deceptive schemes' will result in 'significant' punishment. He also ordered her to pay a $40,000 administrative penalty and $90,000 in enforcement expenses."

"Pendray found she had submitted mortgage applications for five different properties that she either owned or was purchasing, providing falsified income information on each one. Unlike other cases referenced by the parties in their submissions, Rohani's misconduct was not limited to a single transaction involving falsified documents or a series of such transactions during a brief period of time, according to the decision. 'Rather, in this case Ms. Rohani repetitively, over the course of a number of years, elected to personally participate in a deceptive mortgage application scheme for her own benefit, and subsequently, arranged for her clients to participate in the same deceptive mortgage application scheme,' the decision reads."

The Vancouver Sun in Canada. "'Will prices come down further?' That’s the top question on the minds of home hunters who walk into realtor Adil Dinani’s office in Coquitlam these days. After several months of cool sales and rising inventory in Metro Vancouver’s real estate market — with a big jump in June — it seems like a reasonable assumption that conditions have tipped in favour of buyers. Inventories of condos are rising more quickly with large numbers of buildings under construction coming to completion, and plenty of presale buyers looking to sell their units. However, detached homes and duplexes that are in good locations and 'sharply priced' are still seeing multiple offers, Dinani said."

"'This is the caveat. If this trend of listing inventory continues and is not met with an increase in buyer activity or a drop in interest rates, then we could see some price softness,' Dinani said. 'We’re seeing that in the condo market.' If they’re looking at condos, 'you can be aggressive (with offers) out there,' Dinani said. 'Because there’s certainly more supply coming online, especially over the next year.' 'My advice is not to be overly aggressive,' he added. 'Buyers want to know (that) what they’re going to buy today is not going to be worth less tomorrow,' Dinani said."

"Surrey realtor Manny Chehil of Sutton Group West Coast Realty said buyers who are already in the market need to know where they want to move to and their 'motivations have to be clear.' 'If there’s a reason to sell, you sell,' Chehil said. 'Otherwise … I tell people you should think twice before you list.'"

ABC News in Australia. "When retired policeman Geoff Gauci packed up his old life and moved to an over-50s gated community on Melbourne's northern fringe, he pictured his next chapter as peaceful. Seduced by promises of low maintenance and resort-style living at an affordable price, he bought into a Lifestyle Communities development at Wollert, impressed with its high-security cameras and boom gates that guarded a manufactured urban landscape of neat rows of uniform houses and perfectly manicured fake lawns. But 18 months later, earlier this year, he and two other residents, Thom Meads and Steve Doudle, found themselves investigating the utopia they thought they'd bought into. 'To me, it's like I'm in a financial prison,' Gauci says. 'I've got to bail myself out in order to get out, and it's just wrong.'"

"Lifestyle Communities specialises in land lease communities in Victoria, where residents buy the home, usually a manufactured or moveable dwelling, and rent the land, similar to a caravan park. The company is part of the booming $12 billion land lease industry, a sector that houses more than 130,000 Australians across the country, fuelled by a housing affordability crisis and an ageing population. Gauci's battle with Lifestyle began when he realised one of its competitors, Stockland, was not charging its land lease residents exit fees, but had been selling properties at similar prices, off the plan, which would charge a similar rent and provide similar facilities, just a short ride from his home."

"Doudle believes the exit fee was misrepresented to him, and he would have never bought into the community if he knew then what he does now. 'Being here now after three and a half years, knowing what I know, if I knew that at the time of signing, I would not be here,' he says. 'When I die … it could take two years to sell or three … why would somebody want to buy in here, when they can go down the road and buy one with no [exit] fees … and by the time maybe they sell it, there'd be nothing for my children,' one resident said."

"Robert Humphris says he tried to get out after realising what he bought wasn't what he expected. He told 7.30 'we were victims of the advertising jingle,' noting that the marketing spin made everything look like Disneyland. He says it cost him almost $100,000 to get out of Lifestyle, including $63,000 in exit fees, short term rental and home improvements, wiping out most of his capital gain. 'And in your late 60s you never get that back,' he says."

The Wall Street Journal. "For years, Liuzhou and scores of other Chinese cities together amassed trillions of dollars in off-the-books debt for economic development projects. The opaque financing was the yeast that helped China rise to the envy of the world. Today, overgrown construction sites, sparsely used highways and abandoned tourist attractions make much of that debt-fueled growth look illusory and suggests China’s future is far from assured. Liuzhou, a city in the southern region of Guangxi, raised billions of dollars to build the infrastructure for a new industrial district, where a state-owned financing group acquired land and opened hotels and an amusement park. Other tracts of acquired land sit vacant, and many area streets look practically deserted. Birds flit through the rows of abandoned buildings at an unfinished apartment complex. 'The government is broke,' said one local resident who watched the project falter from her shop across the street."

"At the heart of the mess are the complex state-owned funding vehicles that borrowed money on behalf of local governments, in many cases pursuing development projects that generated few economic returns. The deterioration of China’s real-estate market in the past three years meant local governments could no longer rely on land sales to real-estate developers, a significant source of revenue. Economists estimate the size of such off-the-books debt is somewhere between $7 trillion and $11 trillion, about twice the size of China’s central government debt. The total amount isn’t known—likely not even to Beijing, say bankers and economists—because of the opaqueness surrounding the financial arrangements that allowed the debt to balloon."

"Many of the projects funded by LGFVs turned out to be ill-timed, ill-conceived or both. Liupanshui, a city in the region of Guizhou, set up six LGFVs for 23 tourism projects, including construction of a ski resort on a mountain that typically gets enough snow for less than two months a year, though it also is open for offseason recreation. State media reported that 16 of the 23 city ventures are idle 'low-efficiency' projects."

"Another LGFV, in neighboring Yunnan province, ran up $8.4 billion in debt to build projects, including 'artistic living space.' After the housing was done, not enough people wanted to live there. The project was sold in 2021, literally, for a few cents, to another LGFV in the same province. 'The reckoning has arrived,' said Victor Shih, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who researches China’s politics and financial system."