A report from the Edmonton Journal. "Retirement dreams of a million or so Canadian snowbirds are facing hurdles different from the constrictions of the pandemic or challenges finding travel insurance. In Palm Springs, California, in Weslaco, Texas, or Yuba City, Arizona, warmth awaits for aching bones amidst palms and prickly pear. But this year some Canadians are waving bye-bye for the foreseeable future. Cathrine Robinson is a Barrie, Ont., resident. She and her husband are selling their recently renovated dream winter home on a rented lot just five miles from Orlando’s Disneyworld. It was a tough decision, Robinson said. 'I think Canadians who insist they are going back to the States next year don’t read the news and are blissfully unaware of what the Trump regime (not administration) is doing.'"

"In New Brunswick, snowbird Brent Stanley said such issues are just all 'hype and social media frenzy, sensationalized media and untruths. American people are great, it’s a tariff war between countries that has gone on for years,' Stanley said. Keith Goforth, a B.C. snowbird, said he may even spend more time south of the border next year, depending on the outcome of Canada’s April 28 federal election. In fact, he said, 'there may be a few million spending more time in the USA.'"

From Realtor.com. "One of the nation’s top homebuilders has been forced to drastically cut its construction prices in Florida because of the state’s slowing housing market. Rob McGibney, COO of KB Home revealed to investors in late March that the company had to reduce prices by more than $30,000 in the Sunshine State to drum up local business. 'In broad terms, Florida was our softest state in terms of sales demand in the first quarter,' McGibney said. 'Because of that, we took the most pricing action there to find the market.' Most 'affordability adjustments,' better known in layman’s terms as price reductions, that KB Home had to offer in the first quarter of 2025 ranged between $5,000 and $30,000 per home, but the company had to 'do more in Florida to find that market.' On the earnings call, McGibney highlighted Jacksonville as a particularly weak link in Florida, given that the city has more than seven months’ worth of unsold homes piled up on the market, prompting KB Home to slash prices even more. Due to slowing buyer demand, Jacksonville also saw its share of for-sale homes with price reductions soar to just under 28% in March. The median list price in the Florida metro last month was $399,000, down nearly 4% year over year."

"The report attributed the market wobbling in many major metros, including Jacksonville, Miami, and Memphis, TN, in part to consumers’ growing concerns about still-high mortgage rates and the state of their personal finances. The KB Home COO noted that Orlando and Tampa markets also softened during Q1 2025. Realtor.com data from March indicates that Tampa had the second-highest share of homes with price reductions, at just under 29%, among the large metros. Meanwhile, pending home sales in the city declined nearly 12% from a year ago, and the median list price was down more than 4.5%. In Orlando, the number of active listings surged more than 45% from the year before, and homes spent 60 days on the market in March. Nearly a quarter of all the for-sale properties in Orlando offered a price cut, up 4.5 percentage points year over year."

The Denver Post in Colorado. "Denver, long known for having a tight supply of homes available for sale, is now a leader among metro areas nationwide for how quickly it is building a backlog of unsold inventory. The number of homes for sale nationally jumped 28.5% in March compared to the same month a year ago, according to a report from Realtor.com. All of the 50 largest metro areas experienced an increase over the past year, with new listings outpacing sales. San Jose, Las Vegas and Denver all clocked increases of just over 67% or 2.4 times faster than the nationwide average increase. Denver technically had the third largest increase, but the difference amounts to a rounding error — 67.3% vs. 67.9% in San Jose."

"'Not only did San Jose, Denver and Las Vegas experience significant gains year-over-year, they are part of the group of 18 metros where inventory levels now exceed pre-pandemic levels,' Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, wrote in her report. Texas markets with strong construction activity like San Antonio, Dallas and Austin, have seen a sharp rise in their inventories. Metro Denver’s inventory of homes for sale was at 9,764 in March, which remains below the four-decade average for the month of 13,188, according to the Denver Metro Association of Realtors. Inventories are increasing faster for condos and townhomes. There were 3,567 listings for attached homes at the end of March, compared to 1,905 a year earlier, an increase of 87.2%, according to DMAR counts. For detached homes, the increase was 57.1%, from 3,944 to 6,197. A year ago, condos and townhomes represented 32.5% of the inventory available to buyers. Last month, it was 36.5%. But despite the added supply and lower prices, buyers aren’t jumping. 'The entry-level condo market is what is driving the stack up. We are backed up on the condo resale market,' said Keri Duffy, a member of DMAR’s market trends committee and a Realtor with Kentwood Real Estate. Although median condo prices are down 6.2% over the past year, it isn’t enough to offset higher HOA fees, given that a long-awaited drop in mortgage rates hasn’t emerged."

"About a quarter of Denver homesellers, 24.4%, had to cut the listing price in March, one of the highest rates in the country after Phoenix, Orlando and San Antonio, according to Realtor.com. It was much worse for condo sellers, where 77.2% had to take a haircut in February, according to Redfin. Mike Bruce, president of DMAR’s board of directors, also attributes rising inventory to what he calls 'pent-up' seller demand. Some sellers have failed to appreciate how much the market has moved against them after years of being able to call the shots and not having to improve their curb appeal or show an adequate amount of 'flex' to buyers. 'There are a bunch of people who tried selling and didn’t succeed. They took the home off the market and they are trying again,' he said. Homes have to stand out from the get-go, or buyers, faced with an abundance of choices, will simply swipe left, agents said. 'During COVID, we showed so many dirty homes,' Duffy recalled. She then shared a thought she wanted to say out loud — 'I know you are going to have 40 offers, but please clean the tub.'"

The Washington Post. "When Bob Dempsey began shopping for a new home insurance policy last summer, he did not think of his neighborhood as prone to dangerous weather. His two-story brick home in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake is not directly on the water. In 2017, when Hurricane Harvey unleashed more than 25 inches of rain on the region, Dempsey’s house did not flood. Yet most major insurers turned him down last year. The ones that did offer to sell him a policy — companies he had never heard of — were charging annual premiums between $10,000 and $15,000. 'If we were cartoon characters, the eyeballs would have been popping out of our heads,' said Dempsey. He and his wife had lived in their house for two decades and watched their annual insurance costs gradually climb to about $4,300. Now they were skyrocketing. 'We’ve cut some things, a little bit of travel, a little bit of eating out,' said Dempsey. As they approach retirement, he and his wife are thinking about moving to another part of Texas or out of state."

The Los Angeles Times. "A group of property owners affected by the January wildfires is suing major California insurer carriers, including the state's largest, State Farm, for allegedly violating California's antitrust and unfair competition laws. The lawsuits follow others regarding insurers' handling of the aftermath of the Eaton and Palisades fires, including against Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara and the California FAIR Plan (specifically about smoke damage), the state's beleaguered insurance plan of last resort. 'Homeowners across the state should not be on the hook for the L.A. fires because insurance companies abandoned those neighborhoods and dumped homeowners on the FAIR Plan,' Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog told The Times in January. Meanwhile, many who lost their homes in the L.A. fires are calling for a formal government investigation of major insurance providers, alleging that delays and denials have kept them in dire financial straits and housing limbo."

The San Francisco Chronicle in California. "The start of spring usually brings a rush of home sales — and higher prices. This year is little different, with several Silicon Valley ZIP codes seeing significant jumps in home values in just the past six months. The result is a geographically striking dichotomy: Prices are up across the relatively affluent South Bay and Peninsula, while prices in the East and North Bay are stagnant or even down. Values in multiple Oakland ZIP codes continued to tumble by 3% or more over the past six months. Elsewhere in the East Bay, the trajectory was even more striking: Home values in the 94595 ZIP code in Walnut Creek, which includes Saranap and insurance-strapped Rossmoor, dropped by nearly 6%. Piedmont, despite having relatively high home values, appears to be something of an exception to the overall trend. In March, the city had a typical home value of $1.43 million, down from $1.47 million in September. Piedmont is completely surrounded geographically by Oakland, which has seen one of the Bay Area’s steepest home value drops."

"In the 94595 ZIP code in Walnut Creek, where the typical home is valued at $764,000, one condo was listed in September for $749,000, but sold in March for just $705,000, according to Redfin. Another had a $55,000 price cut between November and February."

The Hamilton Spectator in Canada. "Hamilton is exploring breaks on development charges to ease the pain of a major market slump that’s threatening the viability of residential projects and job losses. The city is also looking into relief measures for other local industry shaken by the fallout of tariffs imposed on Canadian goods amid ongoing trade salvos with the United States. Last week, Mike Collins-Williams, CEO of the West End Home Builders’ Association presented a bleak outlook in urging councillors to not hike development charges by 4.2 per cent in June and instead follow other municipalities like Burlington and Vaughan in pursuing relief measures. 'If you haven’t noticed, the world is on fire,' he told them, noting the residential construction industry was on track for its worst crash in 30 years, with thousands of jobs at risk through delayed or cancelled projects."

"The hardest hit sector is highrise residential, which has 'non-existent' project launches and sales, said Collins-Williams, pointing out development charges of about $100,000 per unit in some cases won’t help reverse the trend. 'This is a level of cost-loading that no other sector of the economy would be asked to endure without serious consequences.' A combination of higher interest rates, spiking mortgage rates, escalating construction costs, stricter project financing and priced-out buyers has contributed to the pain. 'In my ward, I’ve got land that is sitting fallow,' Coun. Brad Clark said about projects in upper Stoney Creek with development approvals. 'And nothing’s happening.'"

BBC News in the UK. "A new-build house inspector, known as a snagger, is urging owners to check their property thoroughly after picking up the keys, as he has found some strange things in people's homes. 'Finding things like sandwiches, food waste and bottles is, unfortunately, fairly common,' says professional snagger Chris Greenwood, who identifies issues with the quality of the home after the building work has been completed. He says he has even found bottles of urine, which 'tend to be under baths or under shower trays.' 'It makes you wonder what else has been missed,' he adds. Chris says his finds can range from the mundane, such as bumpy plasterwork, to the bizarre, which includes socket plates with no wiring behind them."

"The BBC joined him on his latest inspection at a new-build house in Lincolnshire, where he immediately found a mouldy sandwich in the loft. 'It's embarrassing because [it shows] no one has been up and looked at those items prior to completion,' he says. 'It's a really, really quick check. It took me the time to get my ladder out and popping my head into the loft to identify those issues. It doesn't give the customer the confidence that other things have been checked if that's the first thing I am putting on my report.' 'I am not being picky,' Chris adds. 'It's a brand new house. It should be of a high standard at handover. If you were to buy a brand new car and it was full of dents, you would question why. So, no. The developer needs to pick these items up, identify them and rectify them in a timely manner.'"

From Hespress. "Morocco’s National Judicial Police have launched a wide-reaching investigation into allegations of fraud and financial irregularities surrounding a stalled real estate project in Sidi Maârouf, on the outskirts of Casablanca, following a complaint filed by Attijariwafa Bank. According to Hespress AR sources familiar with the case, the inquiry, ordered by Casablanca’s Public Prosecutor General, Saleh Tizari, centers on two brothers accused of securing substantial bank loans under false pretenses for a housing project that began over 15 years ago but remains incomplete. The initial complaint outlines a series of potentially criminal acts, including fraud and misappropriation of funds, tied to a housing development that triggered mass protests from buyers as early as 2011. Despite paying deposits totaling more than 6 billion dirhams, purchasers have yet to receive their homes."

"Investigators from the National Judicial Police are expected to summon a number of real estate developers, company executives, and accountants. Financial records suggest some of these individuals received vast sums of money from the troubled development firm, raising suspicions over discrepancies between the funds received and services rendered. In a particularly alarming discovery, a shell company was allegedly established to transfer assets from the loan-receiving firm, potentially for illicit resale at inflated prices that did not reflect those declared to the public or the financing bank."

"In a rare move, Attijariwafa Bank initiated criminal proceedings against the developers, a decision that signals a possible shift in the financial sector’s approach to loan-related misconduct. The bank has already filed two foreclosure motions before the Casablanca Commercial Court to auction off two villas mortgaged as collateral. It is seeking to recover over 50 billion dirhams.The scandal may serve as a precedent for future legal action against other developers accused of diverting funds meant for real estate ventures. Meanwhile, dozens of aggrieved buyers remain in legal limbo, having paid in full for properties they were never able to occupy."

Korea Joongang Daily. "The number of unsold new homes in Korea has reached the highest level in 11 years and five months, data showed Sunday, due mainly to weak demand for new homes in provincial regions. There were 23,722 unsold new apartments nationwide as of the end of February, doubling from 11,855 tallied a year earlier, according to the data by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. It marked the highest level since Korea saw 24,667 unsold new homes in September 2013."

"About eight out of 10 unsold new homes were located outside of Seoul, with the most located in Daegu, followed by North and South Gyeongsang, according to the tally. In contrast, there were only 652 unsold new homes in Seoul. In February, the government announced a plan to buy unsold new homes and use them for public rental housing, which marked the first such purchase since 2010."