A report from Fox 35 Orlando in Florida. "At the Aug. 7 Palm Bay City Council meeting, the council unanimously approved a new way to start tackling abandoned construction sites across the city. Homeowners are thankful to see something being done about the issue. 'Who wants a brick flying through their house? Hurricane season is coming, storms, a lot can happen,' said Palm Bay homeowner Olajuwon Postell who lives near an unfinished home. The reason properties stall has to do with fluctuating housing markets across the state, according to experts in the field. 'Most developers don’t carry a deep enough reserve to handle the drought in the real estate marketplace, and because of that those projects get abandoned,' said Scott Widerman, who’s a real estate attorney with Widerman Malek law firm."

From WDSU News 6. "Insurance has become an all-too-familiar plight for Louisiana residents due to the widespread damage left behind by catastrophic hurricanes. Earl Dauterive III, a resident of St. Bernard Parish, faced significant challenges with insurance claims after Hurricane Katrina devastated his home. 'We had a two-story house and half of the roof came off,' Dauterive said. 'We had 13 feet of water in the house.' The storm's aftermath led to a prolonged battle for homeowners seeking funds to rebuild from their insurance companies. Thousands of lawsuits were filed against insurance companies for denying or underpaying claims. Many homeowners, including Dauterive, faced litigation over whether their homes were destroyed by wind or flood. 'We were in a zone that the flood maps said we didn't need flood insurance, so we never did get flood insurance when we purchased the home,' Dauterive said. 'And we never flooded.'"

"Insurance expert Brian Keefer noted a shift in thinking regarding flood insurance. 'I hear all the time, 'I'm not in a flood zone, so I don't need flood insurance,' Keefer said. 'Everybody is in a flood zone. Forty-three percent of the flood losses nationwide are in non-special hazard areas.' Keefer mentioned that post-Katrina, Louisiana pushed for tort reform to streamline claims and reduce attorney fees, a challenge Dauterive faced in court. 'We didn't do too well in court. We did an arbitration. We got less than half of what our actual benefit was,' Dauterive said. 'And then the attorney got a third of it.'"

From Mansion Global. "The U.S. home market is mired in its slowest summer slump in a decade. South Florida markets saw the biggest change in the time homes are spending on the market, signaling that their once-frenzied housing boom has calmed. In Fort Lauderdale, homes took an average of 92 days to find a buyer, 23 more than a year ago. In both West Palm Beach and Miami, the average time on the market increased by 18 days from last July. 'It’s a weird market right now,' said Shauna Pendleton, a Redfin Premier real estate agent in Boise, Idaho. 'For the most part, it’s crickets. I recently did a $100,000 price drop on my listing that had sat on the market for several weeks at over $600,000, only to lure one interested buyer. But there are also pockets of competition. I had a fixer-upper listing get seven offers after we priced it aggressively at $320,000.'"

The Manteca Bulletin in California. "There is a home within walking distance of Manteca High. The lawn is dead. There are several vehicles parked on it. One appears to be inoperable. There is some items that might be described politely as junk in the front yard. Several bushes are dead as well. Before you start scratching your head, here’s the scoop. It is a rental. Someone owns it and rents/leases it out to make money. That makes the house a business. It should be treated no different than a 7-Eleven. And if a 7-Eleven looks like a dilapidated junkyard, the City of Manteca, assuming code enforcement is more than just lip service, would be enforcing the conditions of approval placed on that business. If you think that is an overreach, drive to the four corners of Manteca. Take in real old neighborhoods, old neighborhoods, relatively new neighborhoods, and even a few neighborhoods that are channeling the Terrible Twos. More than a share of problematic properties are rentals."

"The city needs to improve the quality of life, fight blight, and step up its effort to stop the trashing of Manteca. They can start by pulling a much lauded play from their 2008 playbook to fight back on trashed homes when Manteca-Stockton-Tracy-Lathrop was the foreclosure capital of the United States. Homes would be in foreclosure and no one lender would take responsibility for them. So the city wised up. The fine was a minimum of $1,000 a day. There was some pushback. The city’s retort: The owner of foreclosed homes are owned by businesses to make money. They are not owner occupied. It didn’t happen over night. But within a year Manteca went from the poster city for trashed foreclosures to getting a handle on the cancerous mess. Here we are 17 years later. The real question is why is Manteca is allowing a fair number of businesses to trash neighborhoods."

The Bay Area Newsgroup in California. "The 9-acre site for a development that could produce as many as 950 housing units in Santa Clara has been seized by a lender, documents on file with Santa Clara city planners show. An affiliate of Related Cos. surrendered its ownership of the property at 2101 Tasman Dr. and 2222 Calle de Luna, public real estate documents filed on Aug. 12 show. BrightSpire Capital, acting through an affiliate, is the lender that took control of the property through a deed in lieu of foreclosure, according to Santa Clara County documents. In 2019, BrightSpire Capital provided the Related California affiliate with the loan. The Related-controlled entity bought the two parcels in 2015, paying $64.1 million. The foreclosed housing development site as envisioned by Related California had yet to begin vertical construction, a direct observation by this news organization shows. BrightSpire this year also foreclosed on the Signia by Hilton San Jose hotel. BrightSpire may put the tower on the sales block sometime in 2026. It’s unclear what BrightSpire’s plans might be for the Santa Clara site."

From Macleans in Canada. "In the spring of 2022, Nizar Tajdin, a 41-year-old Montrealer, signed a deal he thought would set him up financially for years to come. On the advice of a realtor he’d met through a friend, Tajdin made a 10 per cent deposit on an $855,000 pre-construction condo. It was a 468-square-foot, one-bedroom unit in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighbourhood, a wealthy enclave not far from downtown. It was called an assignment sale. In essence, it means flipping a condo that doesn’t yet exist. Tajdin says Hirji told him that he could make back double his deposit; he even offered to find a buyer in exchange for a fee. If he couldn’t close, he’d forfeit his entire deposit. He took the plunge, using his entire life savings of about $60,000 and borrowing the rest from his family. Then he waited for Hirji to find a new buyer."

"The same month Tajdin signed his deal, Toronto condos reached an average price of $808,000, after years of surging demand that had helped turn the city into one of the least affordable real estate markets on Earth. Unfortunately for Tajdin, it was also the moment the bubble began to deflate. Tajdin has already spent a small fortune on legal fees and could be looking at years of legal battles ahead. If a judgement is rendered against him, he fears being forced to file for bankruptcy. 'A bankruptcy effectively costs you the next seven years of your life.' he says. 'One would not be able to get financing for a car or a house, or make online purchases or reservations. You lose your freedom, you lose your convenience. Your reputation and credibility suffers.'"

"Sara suffered the same bad timing that Nizar Tajdin did. In March of 2022, the Bank of Canada hiked interest rates, signalling the end of the cheap-money era. Over the next 18 months, rates rose nine more times. Sales of new condos in the GTA fell over the next 12 months to a 15-year low as mortgage costs skyrocketed. When Sara couldn’t close, CentreCourt, the same developer suing Tajdin, sued to keep her deposit and have told her they will seek additional damages, which could run another $100,000 or more. 'Online, people are calling us greedy investors and saying we deserve to suffer like this,' says Sara. 'But the ones losing right now are middle-class and working-class people like me, who were just securing something for our family’s future. The people who are actually rich aren’t losing here. They’re just waiting for the market to recover.'"