A report from the Ahwatukee Foothills News in Arizona. "Building permits for single-family homes are rebounding this year in Maricopa and Pinal counties, according to The Cromford Report’s analysis of the first seven months of data, and the city of Phoenix is riding the wave.Don’t look at the East Valley for any rebound. Referring to its own index based on sales trends of the last four months, the Cromford Report said sellers’ position has soured in much of the East Valley, particularly Chandler and Tempe. 'One concern is that the cities with the most positive change are relatively small,' it said. 'The largest markets like Phoenix and Mesa are still declining and Scottsdale is only showing a minor gain of 2%. This means our 1.2% average gain is not as significant as it might otherwise be.' 'While the positive trend exists, it is still so weak that a breath of wind could blow it over,' it added."

"The Cromford Report has frequently noted that new-home sales this year have been overtaking re-sales. Last week, it said, 'The re-sale market has been much weaker than the new home market and year-to-date closing volumes are down from 2023.' It said re-sale closings totaled 45,937 as of June 30 – down 4% from the first six months of last year. 'We do not often see the new home and re-sale markets so disconnected from each other,' the Cromford Report said."

The Center Square. "A new Florida condominium law is affecting the Sunshine State's real estate market. The new measure requires costly inspections, significantly increasing homeowners' costs. 'The big pullback in the condo market is the rising insurance costs and new laws that require buildings to have full reserves by next year. Prices are pulling back, because nobody can afford the association fees anymore,' Jennifer Levin, a realtor with Compass in Fort Lauderdale told Realtor.com. Data shows that total active condo listings in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties increased from 8,497 listings in the first quarter of 2023 to 20,293 listings by the second quarter of 2024. The report notes that in the second quarter of 2024, 7,961 condos listed for sale in Miami-Dade were over 30 years old. Broward has approximately 5,166 condo listings over 30 years old, while Palm Beach has 4,669. Less than 1,000 condos across all three counties were less than 10 years old."

The Real Deal on Texas. "Two Dallas—Fort Worth area homes are about to be seized by feds, who claim the properties were purchased with money made through a 'Ponzi-type' scheme. A group was investigated for generating $138 million from clients under the guise of making a profit buying and selling international bonds. Instead of investing the funds, the group used the money to pay previous investors and for their own purposes, the complaint alleges. Destiny Hunter LLC purchased the Heath property in May 2024 with a $1.94 million mortgage from AMGT Capital LLC, loan documents show. In June, Destiny Hunter also secured a $721,000 mortgage for 10 Sunset Trail in Rockwall, a $417,000 mortgage for 4321 Soaring Star Lane in Mesquite and a $239,000 mortgage for 1215 Paladao Drive, also in Mesquite. AMGT was the lender for all three loans. Prosecutors are asking the district court to forfeit the Fort Worth and Heath properties."

The Real Deal on California. "A San Francisco crowdfunder with a history of financial crimes defrauded investors out of millions of dollars by misappropriating funds as his firm was bleeding cash, a recent complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission alleges. Bernardo Mendia-Alcaraz, who heads Toltec Capital, allegedly told investors their capital would fund loans to residential real estate buyers and developers. Instead, he paid himself and other investors, in what the SEC characterizes as a ponzi-like scheme. The 52-year-old crowdfunder inflated his resume to lure investors."

"Between 2019 and 2023, Mendia solicited over $3 million from 41 investors by marketing himself as a 'well-educated' professional with a 'long track record of success,' the complaint reads. He flaunted 'academic credentials' from the Godman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. In truth, Mendia never went to UC Berkeley and was held in a California detention center during the 2008 financial crisis for previous alleged financial crimes. He had also filed for bankruptcy six times in 2019, the same year he started raising money for the Toltec funds. The SEC alleges Mendia guaranteed investors fixed returns — another red flag of fraud — if they sunk money into his real estate funds. But the crowdfunder couldn’t deliver."

"When investors asked when returns were coming, Mendia would peg delays on accounting problems and promise payments would arrive soon. In one instance, Mendia convinced two investors to extend their contract when he struggled to deliver. At the time, Toltec’s accounts had a negative balance, the SEC claims. Meanwhile, Mendia had been plugging those shortfalls with funds from other investors, a glaring sign of a ponzi scheme. The fraudulent scheme is the latest to come to light in recent weeks. In July, the SEC charged a Southern California investor with misappropriating funds raised to fix and flip homes. The investor had spent the money on a Mercedes-Benz, a Mexico vacation and paid off his home mortgage."

From Bloomberg. "San Francisco has long celebrated its progressive values and immigration sanctuary policies. A deadly fentanyl crisis is testing its commitment to those ideals. Open-air drug markets dot a downtown already struggling to recover from the pandemic. A record number of people died from overdoses last year. Faced with a deepening emergency, city leaders have quietly embraced a controversial tactic to combat the epidemic: deportation. More than 100 people, mostly undocumented immigrants, have been charged in a federal crackdown on San Francisco’s open-air drug markets since last year, according to a review of cases and data from the US Attorney for the Northern District of California. Those prosecuted under the program are often given a stark choice between risking lengthy prison sentences or pleading guilty, which avoids major prison time and frequently leads them to face deportation proceedings."

"Street store, has complained to city officials about open-air drug markets, streets in disarray, and an assault on an employee, according to e-mails obtained through a public records request. 'Everyday people are using drugs,' Ricardo Tapia, an Ingka operations manager, wrote in a May e-mail to San Francisco police and a nonprofit group. Some people clashed with customers or garbage trucks; others started fires or tried to 'sneak into our dock while tenants receive their deliveries.' The road 'smelled terrible' due to human waste on the building’s exit doors. The conditions were leading to revenue loss, Tapia said."

"Matt Dorsey, a San Francisco supervisor who is sober after struggling with his own drug addiction, said the city is seeing a 'realignment of urban politics that is more centered and rooted in public order and public safety.' 'We can’t have disorder and unchecked drug markets going on because we’re adhering to some larger principle of ‘we don’t want to do something that Donald Trump is going to point to and say he likes,’ Dorsey said. 'And if cities are to succeed, we Democrats have to be trusted to govern.'"

From Fox 5. "Experts are warning that some affordable housing developers in the District are on the verge of collapse. Now, lawmakers say it’s time to crack down on one of the key factors at the root of the problem: tenants not paying their rent. According to insiders, affordable housing properties in Washington, D.C., could face closures in the coming months, potentially leaving thousands of residents without a home. This looming crisis has largely flown under the radar. Industry analysts predict that more than 20,000 affordable housing units in D.C. are at risk of foreclosure. Shirley Thompson Wright, a resident of Meadow Green Courts for over 25 years, voiced her concerns. 'We have issues with mold, mice, rats, roaches, and the owners becoming slumlords,' Wright said. 'We live here with no security. The owners say they can't pay for security. The buildings are falling apart, and they cannot invest in anything.'"

The St. Catharines Standard in Canada. "It was unclear to real estate experts exactly what the August market would bring. Yet, in Niagara, it was still somewhat surprising to see a drop across all statistics — with benchmark price, sales and listings dipping in both monthly and annual figures. Year-over-year, the benchmark price fell 3.3 per cent, to $640,200 from $662,300 in August 2023; and the days it took to sell a home increased to 45 days (from 33), an increase of 36.4 per cent. At its peak in March 2022, Niagara’s benchmark price hit $815,900. From there, the price declined, bounced back and dipped — January saw Niagara’s lowest number since February 2021, when the benchmark price was $591,600 — before steadying around the $600,000 mark."

"Looking at August numbers, Niagara has seen a total decrease of about $175,000 since 2022. But its numbers remain $200,000 higher than pre-pandemic — the region’s benchmark price hovered around $430,000 in early-2020. An analysis by Wahi last month said the median price of a Niagara home was $662,000 in the second quarter of 2024, about 1.9 per cent lower from the same time a year ago. However, the median price remains up a 'staggering 42.4 per cent since 2020, indicating much of the pandemic run-up prices remain intact.'"

The Toronto Sun in Canada. "While Toronto’s once red-hot condominium investment market has slowed down to a gentle simmer with no prospects things will improve any time soon, opportunities do still exist. Ryan Coyle, co-founder of Toronto-based Connect.ca Realty, a real estate brokerage that specializes in investment strategies, says buyers have more leverage today than they have for much of the last 15 years — provided they look in the right places. 'There’s a ton of assignments out there,' Coyle said. 'I recently bought one at Nobu Residences, that was at 2017 prices, after the purchaser couldn’t close on the unit because they couldn’t qualify for a mortgage.'"

"Data from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB) reveals a surplus of condo supply. There were 17,400 condo rentals reported through the MLS last quarter, increasing by 25.2 per cent from Q2-2023, while rents for one-bedroom units fell by 3.1 per cent to $2,452. Coyle added that cash-strapped investors aren’t the only ones flipping assignments. 'There are deals out there like the one I got — it ended up helping the seller, but I got a great deal too,' he said, adding 'even people who can close are selling on the resale market, because while they can close, they can’t afford the payments.'"

"The problem for condo investors is that, between maintenance fees and mortgage rates, carrying costs leave them in the red. This is especially true for unit-owners in buildings registered no later than November 15, 2018, which are rent-controlled. 'These people are paying interest rates in excess of six, seven per cent, and the yearly rent increase is about three per cent, but many of them struggle finding qualified renters,' said Leah Zlatkin, a mortgage broker. Zlatkin points to research from the Canadian Housing Statistics Program indicating 43 per cent of Toronto condos are investor owned. 'The dollars and cents aren’t necessarily there for a lot of condo investors right now,' she says."

"Families comprise a growing share of the rental pool, but Zlatkin added most inventory on the secondary rental market is insufficiently sized. '[Families] can’t fit into these 400-, 500-, 600-sq. ft condos when it’s two adults and kids,' she continued. 'And the people who can afford to buy these units need more room than a condo offers them.'"

ABC News in Australia. "Have some people forgotten? When Philip Lowe's tenure as Reserve Bank governor was winding down last year, he had some things to say about monetary policy. On numerous occasions, he said there were probably better ways to manage inflation and we should spend time thinking about them. In his final speech to the Anika Foundation, he even floated the idea of giving an independent institution limited powers over new fiscal instruments so it could help to manage inflation alongside the RBA, in ways that would spread the burden of inflation control much more evenly across the community. '[G]iven the limitations of monetary policy … you know, what we're doing affects people very unevenly, I think we should aspire to kind of something better,' he said."

"Tim Hext, the head of government bond strategies at Pendal Group, recently argued that monetary policy was being asked to operate in a very different environment than in the past. 'In fact, monetary policy is now more than ever a wealth redistribution policy within Australia, not just an economic policy,' he wrote. By 'wealth redistribution,' he's talking about the way in which wealth is redistributed away from the young and poor, towards the wealthy."

"That's not to let the RBA off the hook, either. Plenty of economists have criticised the RBA for the mistakes it's made in recent years, including its stuff-up with its forward guidance in the lockdown period, and its tardiness in lifting rates once inflation took off. Why did it take the RBA Board until a few weeks before the federal election in May 2022 to start lifting rates, when headline inflation had already jumped above 5 per cent?"

From Mises.org. "One of the myths being endlessly repeated in this inflationary cycle is the myth that rising prices are caused by greed. For example, Democratic senator Bob Casey is running around Pennsylvania campaigning on the idea while claiming he’ll solve the problem if you re-elect him. Kamala Harris is doing the same. But the fact that greed doesn’t cause inflation is obvious if we just ask why prices across the board have surged since 2020. Since then, consumer prices rose more than twenty percent, knocking off about a fourth of the value of every dollar you hold."

"Is that all because greed suddenly got worse after 2020 for some unknown reason? And, if so, why is it that greed was magically barely a problem at all for many years during the last decade when official CPI inflation rates often came in between 1 and 2 percent? There is no explanation for this greed thesis, and the reason is that there is only one cause of generally rising prices— the thing we could call price inflation. The only cause of this is monetary inflation—that is, a rising money supply. Or, as sometimes stated more casually: printing new money."

"Recall how during the covid lockdowns, the government was paying people to stay home and not work. Where did this money come from? The central bank printed it. There was not money to be had from the Treasury, of course, as the federal government itself was already running huge deficits. The central bank created so much new money in fact, that the money supply has increased by 32 percent since early 2020. And nearly one quarter of all the dollars that are out there right now, were created since then. These are astounding numbers."

"And, we can go back further than that. You want to know why stock prices and real estate prices have been going up so relentlessly for more than ten years? It’s because since 2009, when we began the age of quantitative easing, the money supply is up by 185 percent. For many years, the monetary inflation appeared primarily as rising prices in assets like housing. That’s why CPI inflation seemed 'low' for a long time between 2010 and 2020. But, eventually, the piper must be paid for relentless monetary expansion of the type we’ve experienced since 2009. The frenzy of money creation that occurred since 2020—and the rising prices that followed—have made this clear."