A report from Market Watch. "'The housing sector has weakened in 2025 due to poor affordability conditions, particularly from elevated interest rates,' Buddy Hughes, a home builder and developer from Lexington, N.C., and the chair of the NAHB, said in a statement. Cuts in home prices haven’t stimulated sales much. Many sellers have the option to delist their home and wait out the market, but most builders need to clear their inventory. So they’re ramping up the deals. Oliver Radvin, senior vice president at John Burns Research and Consulting, said that based on their own builder-survey data in June and what he’s seen and heard in Jacksonville, Fla., and across the state, many builders were decreasing prices to bring buyers in — on top of offering incentives such as assistance with closing costs. 'We know from our fieldwork in the market, builders are often advertising (and using) a combination of interest-rate buydowns, closing-cost assistance, credits toward option spend and other incentives along with outright price cuts … in order to make sales,' he said. 'Yes, builders are making sales, however, it is taking lofty incentive packages to get there.' In July, 38% of builders cut home prices, which was the highest share since the NAHB began tracking this figure in 2022. The average price reduction was 5% in July, unchanged from the previous month. The use of sales incentives was also unchanged from last month, with 62% of builders offering them."

The Valdosta Daily Times. "The latest numbers from the Georgia Association of REALTORS show that new listings in Lowndes County more than doubled in May 2025 compared to May 2024—up 116.7% from 18 to 39 homes. Year-to-date listings are up an eye-popping 168%. Buyers are responding enthusiastically: Pending sales jumped 400% over the past year, and closed sales climbed by 416%. At first glance, this robust activity suggests a healthy local market. The median sales price in May dropped to $305,000—an 18.4% year-over-year decrease."

From Colorado Biz. "The housing markets in Denver and Colorado Springs closed out the first half of 2025 with both buyers and sellers facing challenges. Listings in the seven-county Denver metro area jumped to 18,870, in June, an 18.7% increase from a year ago. The surge pushes inventory to levels not seen in 15 years, with June marking the third consecutive month of record highs. 'We are experiencing a buyers’ market, with roughly 1.5 sellers for every buyer,' said Cooper Thayer of Denver-area real estate brokerage The Thayer Group, 'Buyers hold a lot of negotiating power right now. They have so many choices and more time.' Despite this, new listings for single-family homes fell 13.8%, and condos dropped more than 20% from May, indicating that the inventory buildup is largely a result of homes staying on the market longer rather than a flood of new properties. More than 60% of closings in June included a seller concession, averaging more than $10,500, as sellers adapt to attract the limited pool of potential buyers. For buyers looking for condos and townhomes, now is a good time to buy, Thayer said. Denver has about eight months of condo inventory."

"Colorado Springs real estate experts described the Pikes Peak region’s housing market as 'lackluster' and 'stagnant.' While more homes hit the market year-over-year, with a 25.7% increase in active listings, and overall sales rose 6.5%, the market is still constrained in many price points. 'The market continues to feel stagnant in many price points. If you’re trying to sell a property for $450,000 or under its very difficult,' said Patrick Muldoon, president of Muldoon Associates Inc. in Colorado Springs. 'The buyers for those properties are getting hit hardest with all the other price increases. We’re even seeing rental inventory sitting right now, despite being aggressively priced, because affordability is a real problem with the high discrepancy between median wages and median prices.'"

Summit Daily in Colorado. "After several reviews over the past year, a committee has been tasked with taking a closer look at plans for Breckenridge’s upcoming Runway Neighborhood, and its officials are using a new lens: equity. Units in the Runway Neighborhood are specifically for people whose income is anywhere from 85% to 180% of the area median income, which is set by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Pricing for units in the neighborhood could range from $351,000 to $1.3 million. Some social equity advisory commissioners felt the pricing range wasn’t accessible for the local workforce. 'These prices are insane, and I don’t think this is really reflecting what we need,' commissioner Isaura Cirillo said."

"Commissioner wondered if undocumented people were eligible to buy a home in the Runway Neighborhood, and housing program manager Darcy Henning said the town will not consider citizenship status. Cirillo said it will be important to communicate to ITIN number holders that the process of buying a home might look different for them. An ITIN number functions similarly to a social security number, but is for those who do not have proof of legal residency."

The San Diego Reader in California. "Serra Mesa sits high above Mission Valley, perched like a quiet observer of the chaos below. It's a neighborhood that's easy to overlook: unlike nearby Kearny Mesa, no one ever went on a meth-fueled rampage in a tank there. But change has come to Serra Mesa, thanks to the good people of the government. Specifically, the city planning desk. In 2020, in response to a dire housing shortage, the City of San Diego rewrote its rules on Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs). What was once a way to squeeze in a granny flat or a backyard cottage for some failure-to-launch offspring now became a developer’s dream."

"And recently, longtime Serra Mesa homeowner Marisela Quinn took to Nextdoor to vent. Quinn titled her entry 'Would you feel safe if strangers could watch you from their window—all day, every day?' She described how a new two-story duplex had been built up against the property line next to her home. Its upstairs windows provided an unbroken line of sight directly into her living room, dining area, and dressing nook. 'I cry daily,' wrote Quinn. 'I feel watched. I feel violated. We didn’t plan for this, and no one warned us it was coming. The City of San Diego has legalized voyeuristic architecture.'"

From LAist in California. "Homeowners who lost everything in the January wildfires are still on the hook for their mortgage payments. And in the coming months, some of them could end up paying rent for their temporary housing too. Some people have already run out. Others didn't have coverage for costs like temporary housing — typically known as 'loss of use' or 'additional living expenses' coverage. In all, the report found that 6 in 10 of people displaced by the Eaton and Palisades fires won't have coverage left for temporary housing within the year. Andrew King, who has been helping neighbors navigate fire recovery since their block went up in flames, said he sees a crisis brewing that could upend plans to rebuild."

"' If they run out of the temporary housing coverage, then they're gonna be forced to make a really difficult decision about whether or not they have to sell their home or figure out a way to keep paying their rent and their mortgage,' he said. ' You are going to have folks that are likely not going to be able to stay in their homes, and that is going to dramatically impact recovery.' ' We are seeing a lot of people who are underinsured,' said Aimee Williams, who works with homeowners at Bet Tzedek Legal Services in Los Angeles . 'Unfortunately that's really common. And people often find that out only when a disaster like this happens, how common that actually is.' Coming insurance woes aren't the only issue for homeowners. Some are already struggling to pay their mortgages. Homeowners who delayed payments through a state forbearance program told LAist that their mortgage companies are now demanding quick, full repayment despite state rules."

The Langley Advance Times. "If you follow the proceedings of your local city or town council, in any community across Canada, you have heard someone angry about a threat to their property values. The right of a homeowner to ever-rising property values must be enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms somewhere (I must have missed it). And yet, property values have fallen. And they are likely to continue to fall for a while, thank goodness. Because if property values keep rising at the rate they've been going up during the past quarter century, it'll destroy the Canadian economy."

"If you bought a $250,000 house in the Fraser Valley 25 years ago, it's now worth about $1.4 million. That's a 460-per-cent increase! In 2000, the average annual wage for a full-time worker in Metro Vancouver was $46,806, and now it's $72,406, a 54.6-per-cent increase. If the price of housing had only gone up by as much as wages, that $250,000 home would only cost $390,000 today. Real estate, rentals, mortgages, and the construction industry now represents a full 28 per cent of Canada's GDP. You think this country runs on oil and gas, or manufacturing? Nope. Both are dwarfed by the amount we feed into the housing industry. Younger people are increasingly borrowing from their parents (who are borrowing against the inflated values of their homes)."

"But the fever may have broken. Slower rates of immigration, housing reform, and the construction of new rental buildings have combined to halt home price growth. Which is good, because the growth in housing prices wasn't just sucking money out of the wallets of new homeowners, it was robbing from every other aspect of our economy. As more and more people are paying more and more for housing, it's slowly drawing money from every other part of the economy. Our recent bout of high inflation, alongside the biggest spike in housing costs ever seen in this country, has blown up that equation. The cost of your house needs to drop. It's not a retirement savings plan anymore. It's an anchor chained to the economy, and it's dragging it down."

From Interest New Zealand. "Housing Minister Chris Bishop says New Zealand has to decouple its economic growth from house price increases, even if it is difficult in the short-term. Speaking to reporters, he said the economic recovery needed to be driven by broad-based productivity gains and not increases in property prices. 'We've got to decouple the idea that the economy is linked to house price growth. It's not. Destroying the idea that the New Zealand economy should just be based on house price growth is a fundamental formula this government is trying to embed into the New Zealand psyche and also into the arteries of the economy. It will take some time but I'm pleased with the process we're making,' he said. 'It frustrates me that, every time you open up some of the media outlets, there's a huge interest in things like, housing market yet to take off, and everything's characterized as: we need house prices to rise.' The flipside of stagnant house prices was that it would be easier for first time buyers to get into the housing market. This should be 'celebrated rather than bemoaned' he said."

"Economists have pointed to weak asset price growth as one reason the Reserve Bank’s interest rate cuts have had a muted effect. Normally, falling interest rates lift the present value of assets like property, making households feel wealthier and more likely to spend. But buyers remain nervous about their own job security and a big backlog of unsold houses means sellers have little leverage to push for higher prices. Real estate agents say an 'oversupply' of housing has replaced the shortage seen in previous years. Stephen Toplis, head of research at BNZ, said lower interest rates had stopped house prices from falling further but hadn’t put them on an upward trend. 'Household net wealth has flatlined since mid-2021. House value is the key component of this… With asset prices going nowhere fast it shouldn’t be a great surprise that household spending is doing likewise,' he wrote in a recent note."

"Jarrod Kerr, chief economist at Kiwibank, said more cuts to the Official Cash Rate were needed to entice investors back into the housing market and kick start broader growth. 'More rate cuts are needed to stimulate demand in housing. Much of our optimistic forecasts for growth in the Kiwi economy into 2026 is predicated on a bounce in housing demand — It’s the Kiwi way,' he said in a note on Tuesday."