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Some Ran Away With The Money After They Failed To Sell All The Units

A report from the Mortgage Research Council. “In July, there were 63,000 agreements for homes that were called off, about 16% of homes that were under contract, according to Redfin. That’s an increase from a revised rate of 15% in June. ‘Homes are sitting on the market longer now, so buyers realize they have more options and more room to negotiate,’ said Heather Kruayai, a Redfin real estate agent in Jacksonville, Florida. ‘They’re asking for repairs, concessions and contingencies, and if sellers say no, they’re backing out and moving on.'”

“The number of canceled sales is the highest rate on record if the first two months of the Covid-19 pandemic are excluded, Redfin said. The highest number of deal cancellations have occurred in Jacksonville and Las Vegas out of the 93 U.S. metropolitan areas Redfin analyzed. In July, there were about 800 agreements that were called off, which is equal to 29.3% of homes that went under contract. Las Vegas reported 27.4% cancellations while Lakeland, Florida, had 26.2%. New Orleans saw 25.9%, San Antonio was at 25%, Orlando, Florida, had 24.5% canceled agreements.”

The Review Journal on Nevada. “Last year, when buyers were snapping up houses in Las Vegas at a rapid clip, it was anyone’s guess how long the hot streak would last. Now that it’s come to an end, we’re left with another question: how long will the market keep slowing? Sales totals are tumbling, available inventory has soared, and sellers are increasingly dropping their prices. Las Vegas is far from alone, as markets around the country are also hitting the brakes. And two housing trackers told me Friday they don’t expect sales to rebound quickly.”

“Jeff Tucker, senior economist with listing site Zillow, noted it’s difficult to forecast but said the national sales slowdown ‘could drag on for another year or two,’ adding that there seems to be a ‘standoff’ between buyers and sellers. ‘Until and unless mortgage rates drop substantially, I don’t quite see how that standoff gets resolved,’ Tucker said.”

“On the resale side, just over 2,000 single-family homes traded hands in Southern Nevada last month, down almost 38 percent from August 2021. Also, nearly 8,000 houses were on the market without offers at the end of August, up nearly 146 percent year-over-year, trade association Las Vegas Realtors reported. The median sales price of such homes was $450,000 in August, down 3.2 percent, or $15,000, from July. This marked the third consecutive month that prices fell. Moreover, 42 percent of Las Vegas-area listings had a price drop last month, up from just 9 percent in February, according to Zillow’s Tucker.”

My Northwest on Washington. “According to new data released by Northwest Multiple Listing Service, (NWMLS) home prices in the Puget Sound region are still falling from their peak in the spring, but home prices are still higher than they were this time last year. ‘We are seeing significant signs of slowing now. I tend to not look at sale prices, because they are a lagging indicator, not a leading one, so I look at list prices,’ said Windermere Chief Economist Matthew Gardner. ‘We’ve seen those starting to roll over as well, and just pure math states that the pace of price growth has to slow. We’re really, quite frankly, reverting back to the mean. We had two very strange years for lots of reasons in 2020 and 2021, and now with mortgage rates doubling that naturally has caused a lot of issues in terms of people’s ability to afford to buy a home and more listings.'”

“Part of the cooling market is now nearly 50% of houses in Seattle were sold below their initial asking price in July 2022, nearly double the amount from July 2021, across an overall cooling housing market nationwide, according to Redfin.”

From KTVZ in Oregon. “The median home sales price in Bend and Redmond went in opposite directions last month, the Beacon Appraisal Group reported Friday. While Bend’s median sales price dropped by $45,000 to $717,000 in August, Redmond set yet another record, as its median price rose $37,000 to a median $542,000, the report said. Appraiser Donnie Montagner noted that the Bend and Redmond home inventory rose to about two months, a level not seen in over two years.”

From CNBC. “The slowdown in the otherwise red-hot housing boom has been stunningly swift. Paul Legere is a buyer’s agent with Joel Nelson Group in Washington, D.C. He focuses on the competitive Capitol Hill neighborhood, and he said he saw listings jump by 20 to 171 just after Labor Day. He now calls the market ‘bloated.’ As a comparison, just 65 homes were listed for sale in March. ‘This is a very traditional post Labor Day inventory bump and seeing in a week or so how the market absorbs the new inventory is going to be very telling,’ he said. ‘Very.'”

From Inside NOVA. “The typical seller of a Fairfax County single-family home probably would have done best by finding a buyer in late spring. The median single-family home-sales price in Fairfax County at the end of the year is expected to be about 5.5 percent lower that in the heat of summer. The Northern Virginia Association of Realtors (NVAR) and Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University are projecting a median sales price for single-family homes in Fairfax of $841,745 in December, down from $891,000 in May, which is expected to be the peak month for home prices in the county for 2022.”

WKRG in Alabama. “Seeing more ‘For Sale’ signs in front of houses around Baldwin County? A telling sign that real estate sales are slowing down. Kevin Corcoran is the broker of Remax of Gulf Shores. He said that this is the slowest it has been in a while. ‘We study the market every month, and what we’ve seen is somewhat of a plateau of sales, as far as the total number of sales taking place, and inventory has been growing every month, since about March, we have almost 4 times as many condominiums for example on the market as we had just six months ago,’ Corcoran said.”

The Colorado Springs Gazette. “Finally, it appears that housing prices are moderating. As the chart shows, the Housing Opportunity Index used to be almost 71.4% in Colorado Springs, meaning that about 71.4% of the homes sold in our region in 2019 were affordable to a household or individual who earned the median income. That’s actually pretty good. Fast forward to today, and that metric has declined dramatically across the nation. In our region, only 22.7% of the homes sold now are affordable to the median income household.”

“Think about that: Less than a quarter of the available homes for sale, new or existing, are in a price range that a typical-earning household can afford.”

Candy’s Dirt on Texas. “We’ve become accustomed to a crazy real estate situation. For two years, it was almost as if you could mumble about selling in your sleep, and there would be a line of people outside the door at sunrise. When you can’t leave your house, much less go on a vacation, real estate is the one thing you can do. You can buy, sell, trade up, or downsize. That’s what seemingly everyone did. Thankfully, the pandemic has waned, and we are back to an almost normal market.”

“Ryan Streiff and the Perry-Miller Streiff Group assured us the real estate sky was not falling. ‘It was a perfect storm. The sheer number of people that moved to Dallas during the pandemic took the market to a place we had not experienced in the past. And then you had Dallasites looking to upgrade their spaces that were working from home. Everyone was a NOW buyer because they wanted to start enjoying now, and there was a fear of losing out based on the demand.’ Should we be worried about this return to normal? RS: ‘No. Anytime value builds this fast, there have to be minor corrections.'”

The Union Tribune in California. “Short-term rental hosts who have long been able to rent their San Diego dwellings out to visitors free of formal regulations will now have to apply for licensing starting next month and hope they’ll secure a coveted license as part of a city-run lottery. Jonah Mechanic, who for years managed short-term rentals for his host clients, said he’s pleased with the city’s revised timeline for implementing the new regulations. Still, there’s likely anxiety, he said, among hosts who want to be assured they will get a license to operate.”

“‘Hosts now know well in advance if they will get a license or not, so the timeline certainly passes the smell test,’ said Mechanic, who has sold his vacation rental company but has remained involved in providing feedback to the city on implementing the new regulations. ‘I guess there’s some nervousness on the part of hosts because this is a part of people’s livelihoods, whether it’s how they pay their mortgage or putting their kids in college.'”

Fox 5 in California. “While rentals on average are going up, a certain specific type of rental is actually on the decline: one-bedroom apartments. In Los Angeles, the rental price of a one-bedroom apartment is down more than 15% from last year. In Southern California, Ventura, Camarillo, Irvine, Huntington Beach and Woodland Hills all saw one-bedroom apartment rent prices drop between 3-17%. The biggest dips came in Fresno (-28.35%), Long Beach (-24.36%) and Santa Clara (-19.97%).”

From Lew Sichelman. “The mortgage market is in for another big shift in a few months. That’s when a sizable increase — roughly 12% or 13% — in the conforming loan limit appears likely to be announced. If so, it will bring the ceiling to well over $1 million in places where houses are super expensive.”

“The loan limit is a key benchmark for both borrowers and lenders. It is the maximum dollar amount on mortgages that can be acquired by government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Anything under the limit that is sold by primary lenders to the GSEs must comply to their rules (thus the term ‘conforming’), while anything above the ceiling is considered a jumbo loan. If we use the latest figures from the FHFA, another double-digit jump in the loan limit appears to be in the offing. Based on second-quarter numbers, the ceiling would rise 12%, to nearly $725,000. In high-cost markets, it would fly past the million-dollar benchmark to roughly $1,087,500.”

“You won’t hear any griping from struggling Main Street lenders who are trying to stay afloat as the mortgage sector has weakened. They would be eager to take another bite out of the jumbo loan market, where lenders who serve well-heeled borrowers are ‘making a ton of money,’ says Paul Muolo, executive editor of trade publication Inside Mortgage Finance.”

From Kelowna Now in Canada. “Higher interest rates and inflation continue to stifle Kelowna’s housing market. For the fourth month in a row, home prices have dropped and sales remain stagnant. In August, the benchmark selling price of a typical single-family home in the Central Okanagan was $1,017,500, down $114,500 from the record-high $1,132,000 set in April, according to figures from the Association of Interior Realtors.”

“With sales slowing significantly, Kelowna is now officially a buyer’s market, meaning buyers have the upper hand in any transaction and can take their time looking around and negotiating lower prices. Gone are the seller’s market heyday of homes selling quickly for more than asking price as multiple bidders push up the price. In August, the benchmark selling price of a typical townhouse in the Central Okanagan was $772,700, a slide of $57,200 from the May record of $829,000. The benchmark price of a condominium last month in the city was $526,700, a $31,000 adjustment from the April peak of $557,700.”

From Bloomberg. “A Swedish landlord’s stock has fallen by three quarters this year and investors are betting the worst isn’t over. SBB, as Samhallsbyggnadsbolaget i Norden AB is more commonly known, has become the second-most shorted stock in Europe, with bearish bets running at 35% of its free float, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. The scenario is based on concerns that SBB piled on too much debt in the boom years to create a portfolio of about 2,500 properties across the Nordic region.”

“The Stockholm-based company is positioned as the canary in the coal mine for Europe’s teetering real estate market. With Swedish housing prices projected to fall as much as 20% in one of the world’s bubbliest property markets, its business model faces renewed pressure. SBB has about $500 million of debt maturing next year and $1 billion in bonds and loans coming due in 2024, according to Bloomberg. ‘If we don’t have a bond market that’s as open to real estate companies, it’s going to be tough to refinance all of this,’ said Emil Ekholm, an analyst at Pareto Securities. ‘It won’t really be possible to shift all this into bank loans.'”

Global Property Guide. “The average price of high-end condominium units in Phnom Penh plummeted by 11.65% y-o-y (inflation-adjusted) to USD 2,670 per sq. m. in Q2 2022, following annual declines of 20.43% in Q1 2022, 11.38% in Q4 2021, 11.2% in Q3 2021 and 10.32% in Q2 2021. Phnom Penh’s apartment market has been cooling recently mainly due to the oversupply of apartments in the city, according to local real estate experts. It is expected that 2022 will see additional completions of 13,000 condo units, according to CBRE Cambodia.”

The New Zealand Herald. “Unsold property inventories held by Auckland’s largest agency doubled in the last year. Last August, Barfoot & Thompson had 2601 Auckland and Northland residential properties for sale, but last month that hit 4637 unsold properties and in every month this year except January, the agency held more than 4000 unsold properties on its books. New vendors continue to arrive and in August the agency listed 1394 new properties, ‘our highest number of new listings in the month of August for six years,’ Peter Thompson, managing director, said. ‘At month end we had 4637 properties on our books, our highest number of listings at the end of August for 11 years.'”

The Sixth Tone. “In July, Wan Jiani received the letter she’d been dreading: there was an issue with the construction of her new home. Like millions of others in China, Wan and her husband have poured their life savings into a presale apartment, paying for the property years before it’s completed. Now, the developer was saying it needed to push back the delivery date by at least four months. The delay means that Wan’s family will not be able to move into the building until mid-2024 at the earliest. Meanwhile, they will have to continue paying the mortgage — and renting a temporary home in Shanghai.”

“Wan is just praying the project gets completed at all. ‘Given all the bad news spreading around, it’s hard not to imagine the worst-case scenario: What if the building is left unfinished?’ she tells Sixth Tone. It’s easy to understand Wan’s concern. China’s real estate sector has been plunged into its worst debt crisis in decades. Developers across the country are defaulting on payments and bringing construction on new projects to an abrupt halt.”

“Unfinished apartment blocks — known as lanweilou, or ‘rotten-tail buildings,’ in Chinese — ring China’s urban centers. Around 5% of the apartments under construction in 50 major cities — around 71.5 million square meters of property — are now lanweilou, Shanghai Yiju Real Estate Research Institute found in a survey conducted during the first half of 2022.”

“For decades, China’s property boom has been built on a lax presales mechanism, which allows developers to require buyers like Wan to pay for new-build apartments in full long before they are completed. This policy has handed developers enormous power to raise capital, enabling them to finance gigantic amounts of construction. But it has also led to them amassing dangerous levels of debt — and riding roughshod over buyers when projects go sour.”

“For many analysts, the presales mechanism is the root of the current crisis. China’s real estate market cannot be set on a sustainable path, they argue, until the system is overhauled. Yet doing so could also have far-reaching — and painful — consequences for the Chinese economy.”

“‘Developers use the information of their own staff or their close contacts to get mortgages from the bank,’ China’s central bank — the People’s Bank of China wrote in a report. ‘Some developers paid back the bank after they sold the apartments, but some didn’t — they ran away with the money after they failed to sell all the units.'”

“An investment director at a state-backed real estate company, surnamed Cheng, tells Sixth Tone that many developers would be unable to survive without the presale mechanism. Their need for capital is too extreme due to their high debt loads. ‘The development of the property sector is very fast-paced,’ says Cheng, who declined to reveal his full name due to the sensitivity of the topic. ‘If you pull the brake now, many will crash.’ The immediate effect would be to cause developer after developer to fold, leading to a wave of new lanweilou, Cheng says.”

“Wan, the buyer in Shanghai, is more concerned about what will happen to the country’s hundreds of stalled projects — and her half-finished home in particular. She has spent the past few weeks closely monitoring the work at the construction site, and the developer’s other projects in Shanghai. So far, she hasn’t seen anything to suggest the company is about to fold, she says. ‘It feels like there’s a better guarantee here,’ says Wan. ‘The city government won’t allow lanweilou to interrupt its urban development plans, right?'”

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This Post Has 74 Comments

  1. This last link is worth reading in full. They go into detail as how this giant ponzi country got there:

    The Chinese government turned to the private sector to solve the shortage. In 1991, China had 4,200 property developers. Four years later, that number had jumped to more than 33,000, as officials opened up the real estate market. Yet these private firms were brand new and cash-poor. Each developer held just 46.6 million yuan of assets on average in 1996.

    “That asset scale means the developer is incapable of building even one medium-sized residential building in Beijing,” Yan Xiaodong, the then-deputy director of the Beijing Unirule Institute of Economics, wrote in an article published in 1999. “We cannot compare them with foreign real estate developers, which have billions in assets.”

    And so, in 1994, the Chinese government issued a new policy designed to jump-start the market: the urban commercial housing presale management method. The system — which was closely modeled on a similar policy Hong Kong had been using for four decades — allowed developers to begin selling properties inside new residential projects once at least 25% of construction had been completed.

    The regulation took effect in 1995 — and its effect was almost immediate. Chinese developers began routinely demanding buyers pay 100% of the apartment price upfront once they had signed a presale contract. This enabled them to raise huge amounts of capital, and begin scaling up their operations dramatically.

    1. “According to the PBOC, developers were committing fraud on a jaw-dropping scale to fuel their expansion. Under the presale mechanism, many property firms financed the construction of new projects using the capital from mortgages issued for presold apartments. Yet the mortgages were often fake: If the developer couldn’t presell enough properties in time, they simply applied for the mortgages themselves — and assumed they’d find some real buyers later.”

      Nobody could see that happening.

    2. “Meanwhile, real estate firms were able to rip off buyers with impunity. As customers were required to pay the full price in advance, developers enjoyed enormous leverage. Many abused that power, using shoddy materials, installing cheap appliances, or delaying construction without offering compensation, according to Chinese economist Ren Zeping’s research team.”

      They don’t need to import shoddy; it’s readily available!

  2. ‘It feels like there’s a better guarantee here,’ says Wan. ‘The city government won’t allow lanweilou to interrupt its urban development plans, right?’

    I wouldn’t worry about that Wan. You gave them yer real name.

  3. ‘We’ve seen those starting to roll over as well, and just pure math states that the pace of price growth has to slow. We’re really, quite frankly, reverting back to the mean. We had two very strange years for lots of reasons in 2020 and 2021’

    The media is studiously avoiding the question: WTF happened during the CCP virus? It was all over the planet, shack prices went so far so fast, a crash was inevitable. Where were the regulators? The appraisers? The central banks?

    ‘You won’t hear any griping from struggling Main Street lenders who are trying to stay afloat as the mortgage sector has weakened. They would be eager to take another bite out of the jumbo loan market, where lenders who serve well-heeled borrowers are ‘making a ton of money’

    The real estate industrial complex is a very real entity. They haven’t a care about such blatant use of the rigged system to stuff money in their pockets just as the whole sh$t cart is sinking like a turd in a well.

  4. ‘I guess there’s some nervousness on the part of hosts because this is a part of people’s livelihoods, whether it’s how they pay their mortgage or putting their kids in college’

    Getting a job is out of the question, right Johna?

    ‘While rentals on average are going up, a certain specific type of rental is actually on the decline: one-bedroom apartments. In Los Angeles, the rental price of a one-bedroom apartment is down more than 15% from last year. In Southern California, Ventura, Camarillo, Irvine, Huntington Beach and Woodland Hills all saw one-bedroom apartment rent prices drop between 3-17%. The biggest dips came in Fresno (-28.35%), Long Beach (-24.36%) and Santa Clara (-19.97%).’

    Something big is happening with rents. That puddle watching link I posted the other day had the Phoenix apartment market going to hell in a hand-basket. How do those 5% cap rates look now?

    I suspect the economy is in the tank. Notice pet abandonment has been in the news for months. It’s sad, but we’ve seen this before.

    1. I suspect the economy is in the tank. Notice pet abandonment has been in the news for months. It’s sad, but we’ve seen this before.

      Pets are for life. This really sickens me. Some people have no business getting pets.

      2. So are babies, but people have no problem taking the morning after pill or murdering the tiny humans the second they get their positive tests.

  5. From the My Northwest piece: “Seattle ranks among the top 10 metro areas in the country experiencing the fastest increasing rental rates.”

    Ditto for Bellingham, WA. Wages haven’t gone up, but rent increases continue, twice in a year around WWU. My daughter just signed a new lease at higher rates unable to sway the landlord with multiple examples of a declining market.

    1. Meanwhile, there are so many vacant rentals that it’s mind-blowing. The whole thing is a scam, brought to you by central banks and speculators.

  6. A reader sent these in:

    The financial system is getting desperate. They’re just trying to take advantage of what they view as less sophisticated potential borrowers. Late cycle lending risk rising.

    https://twitter.com/akm515/status/1568546596463251456

    Example of a real estate market downturn reality: •Homeowner approached us February 22′ w/ an $860K appraisal in-hand, ordered elsewhere, for their Oakville townhome. •We provided a financing proposal & requested an updated appraisal that surfaced March 22′ for $745K. 1/3

    https://twitter.com/DanielVyner/status/1568609539938713601

    More Americans are using buy now, pay later services for groceries than ever before, per CNBC.

    https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/1568666338704658432

    “New home cancellation rates are the highest EVER.”

    https://twitter.com/GRomePow/status/1568390658943258627

    2. The financial system is getting desperate. They’re just trying to take advantage of what they view as less sophisticated potential borrowers. Late cycle lending risk rising.

      First BofA, now CITI. These big banks should have been shut down in 2008. All of them.

  7. “‘Until and unless mortgage rates drop substantially, I don’t quite see how that standoff gets resolved,’ Tucker said.”

    Maybe this time is different, but last time there was an all out financial panic on Wall Street and K Street, a recession, and a large drop in housing prices that played out over years.

    1. “Who could ever imagine this after Pol Pot”

      There are westerners who are retired there enjoying the lower cost of living and underage children.

      1. Khmer Rouge

        I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that I took a comparative genocide class in college. The most horrific account from a survivor we heard came from the Cambodian genocide. I also have a b-school classmate who lost his sister in the middle of the night to the Khmer Rouge. Those two words chill my blood.

        1. Lest I not forget, my step-brother’s wife’s family came to this country to escape the Khmer Rouge too.

  10. The 2020 election was stolen.

    “Election deniers and elected officials who back rioters from the Jan. 6 insurrection are responsible for eroding the United States’ reputation on the world stage, Vice President Kamala Harris said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” set to air Sunday.

    “Through the process of what we’ve been through, we’re starting to allow people to call into question our commitment to those principles,” Harris said. “And that’s a shame.”

    Attacks on democracy are “very dangerous, and I think it is very harmful. And it makes us weaker”

    https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/11/kamala-harris-election-deniers-u-s-reputation-00056035

    This coming from someone who couldn’t win a single state primary and never polled above 2%. Presidential elections are decided by U.S. voters not by the “world stage” and her concern for the latter confirms she is just another globalist stooge.

    The 2020 election was stolen.

    1. we’re starting to allow people to call into question

      Thinking that people need your permission to ask questions is very dangerous.

    3. This coming from someone who couldn’t win a single state primary and never polled above 2%.

      She spreads her legs for money and power. ‘Nuff said.

    1. And the RINOs love it, too. Both parties are rotten to the very core. We need a new party – a party that represents the people and not the corporate crony capitalists.

  12. ‘Homes are sitting on the market longer now, so buyers realize they have more options and more room to negotiate,’ said Heather Kruayai, a Redfin real estate agent in Jacksonville, Florida. ‘They’re asking for repairs, concessions and contingencies, and if sellers say no, they’re backing out and moving on.’”

    Anyone who buys now, on the cusp of an epic housing bubble bust, is a complete moron.

  13. In July, there were about 800 agreements that were called off, which is equal to 29.3% of homes that went under contract.

    Is that a lot?

  14. ‘Until and unless mortgage rates drop substantially, I don’t quite see how that standoff gets resolved,’ Tucker said.”

    We HBB lowbrows know exactly how the standoff is going to get resolved, Jeff. And we’re waiting on our lawn chairs, celebratory adult beverages in hand, popcorn at the ready.

  15. Also, nearly 8,000 houses were on the market without offers at the end of August, up nearly 146 percent year-over-year, trade association Las Vegas Realtors reported.

    Is that a lot?

  16. We had two very strange years for lots of reasons in 2020 and 2021, and now with mortgage rates doubling that naturally has caused a lot of issues in terms of people’s ability to afford to buy a home and more listings.’”

    “Lots of reasons”? No, Matthew, you dissembling REIC shill, there was only one reason: the Fed went full Zimbabwe with its expansion of the money supply.

  17. “We’re really, quite frankly, reverting back to the mean.”
    “Finally, it appears that housing prices are moderating.”
    “we are back to an almost normal market”

    This kind of thing has become the “subprime is contained” of this cycle.

  18. ‘This is a very traditional post Labor Day inventory bump and seeing in a week or so how the market absorbs the new inventory is going to be very telling,’ he said. ‘Very.’”

    Stop lying, realtor. This is the first wave of greedheads seeing the light and heading for the exits. The stampede hasn’t even started yet, but it’s coming.

  19. In our region, only 22.7% of the homes sold now are affordable to the median income household.”

    Heckova job, “Zimbabwe Ben” Bernanke, Yellen the Felon, & BlackRock Jay.

  22. “Short-term rental hosts who have long been able to rent their San Diego dwellings out to visitors free of formal regulations will now have to apply for licensing starting next month and hope they’ll secure a coveted license as part of a city-run lottery.

    Die, speculator scum.

    1. part of a city-run lottery

      More picking winners and losers. Why do some people get to own and operate Airbnb, but not others? Make ALL of them illegal.

  23. ‘We study the market every month, and what we’ve seen is somewhat of a plateau of sales

    Telling to see the REIC shills recycling their lies from 2006-2007. “It’s just a gully.”

  24. ‘I guess there’s some nervousness on the part of hosts because this is a part of people’s livelihoods, whether it’s how they pay their mortgage or putting their kids in college.’”

    If you depend on STRs to pay your mortgage, you had no business financing that shack in the first place.

    1. “if you depend on STRs to pay your mortgage, you had no business financing that shack in the first place.”

      These geniuses thought they’d discovered the cold fusion of real estate that would pay for itself.

    1. Second comment: “How long till we can officially say the market is in freefall? Asking for a friend.”

  27. https://zenodo.org/record/6904363#.Yx4v5S9lDmp

    The proposed method is applied to evaluate whether the Omicron variant strain of SARS-CoV-2, whose spike protein includes 29 N mutations and only one S mutation, can emerge through natural evolution. The result of binomial test based on the proposed model shows that the bias of N/S mutations in the Omicron spike can occur with a probability of 1.6 x 10^(-3) or less. Even with the conventional model where the probabilities of any kinds of mutations are all equal, the strong N/S mutation bias in the Omicron spike can occur with a probability of 3.7 x 10^(-3), which means that the Omicron variant is highly likely a product of artificial genetic modification.

    https://www.factcheck.org/2022/05/scicheck-navarro-falsely-links-fauci-to-pandemic-origin/

    There is no evidence the virus was created in a lab, let alone as part of any U.S.-funded research.

    2. There is no evidence the virus was created in a lab, let alone as part of any U.S.-funded research.

      WRONG!!!

  29. Way out of character I know.

    But after hearing about Charles addressing Great Britain in his first speech after the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, no matter the cost or travel regulations I felt a burning desire to see the King and be a part of history.

    I ordered a Whopper with cheese meal large onion rings and a Coke.

    Long live the King

    1. Related to this, from a year ago …

      “Aaron Lewis Urges Crowd to Sing ‘F*** Joe Biden’ During Show”

      https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-chant-aaron-lewis-concert-1633395

      Singer Aaron Lewis led a crowd of people to chant “f**k Joe Biden” during a concert in Pennsylvania, videos posted on social media by fans showed.

      Lewis, lead singer of the rock group Staind who became a solo country artist, is a frequent critic of the president and has been wearing “Fuck Biden,” “Impeach Biden” and “I could s**t a better president” clothing while performing on stage in recent weeks.

      While appearing at The Pavilion at Montage Mountain in Scranton on Saturday, September 25, Lewis called on the crowd to sing out “F**k Joe Biden,” with the chant recently being heard across several college football stadiums and other public events throughout September.

  31. Q. Why do banks do this?

    A. Because they can.

    “Average US Credit Card Rate Hits Highest On Record”

    https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/average-us-credit-card-rate-hits-highest-record

    (snip snip)

    “While the Fed’s rate hiking cycle is about to push the overnight Fed Funds Rate to 2.50% in two weeks, banks have so far completely refused to translate these sharply higher wholesale rates into benefits for US savers. In fact, as the following breakdown of consumer deposit rates at the largest US bank, one would think that the US is still stuck at ZIRP.

    “But while big money center banks refuse to even consider lifting the rate on their savings accounts, they have no such qualms when it comes to how much they charge on credit cards, and according to Bankrate.com’s latest survey, the average credit card rate is now 18.03%, the highest on record since January 1996.”

    1. “just maintaining your civilization”

      How long has it been since California had a governor who gave a rat’s @ss about maintaining civilization?

    1. “A reminder just how stupidly gullible some people can be”

      At least Biden is paying off their student loan debt. 🙂

  36. “The Credit Cycle Is Deteriorating Quickly”

    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/credit-cycle-deteriorating-quickly

    (an important snip …)

    “The latest Fed senior loan officer survey shows banks are tightening loan supply quickly, which generally happens in the run-up to recessions.”

    (more snips, some of them refer to charts. go read the article for the entire scoop …)

    “The downside growth risks from the bullwhip effect reversal and extreme lows in liquidity indicators favor risk-off positioning.

    “We advised clients to sell equities and high yield credit into the rally that started in mid-June and put on hedges. The below is an excerpt from our Aug 9th report to clients.

    “US HY spreads look too complacent relative to other market pricing and sharply deteriorating business and credit cycle indicators.

    “US HY vs IG relative performance is very divergent with the S&P drawdown (left-hand chart) and spreads are still very low relative to equity and bond market implied volatility.

    “US HY spreads are below EM IG corporate spreads again and inflows have surged back to US HY funds.

    “The cyclical picture for HY credit is weak. Extreme lows in liquidity LEIs (left-hand chart) and falling corporate cashflows vs capex and buybacks point to sharply rising odds of a spread blowout.

    “The latest Fed senior loan officer survey shows banks are tightening loan supply quickly, which generally happens in the run-up to recessions. Banks are also raising credit spreads, which is currently divergent with current HY credit spreads (right-hand chart).”

  37. Re: The typical seller of a Fairfax County single-family home probably would have done best by finding a buyer in late spring.

    But then what about the buyer? . . .

  38. Chinese property developers slump 87% in the first half of 2022—and it’s possible the housing market still hasn’t ‘bottomed out’
    BY Grady McGregor
    September 2, 2022 at 2:56 AM MDT
    Residents learn about the real estate market in the city of Haian, in China’s Jiangsu province, July 8, 2022.
    CFOTO/Future Publishing

    China’s property crackdown has sunk developers to lows not reached since the 2008 global financial crisis.

    The 136 Chinese real estate companies that report their earnings to Hong Kong and mainland exchanges earned a total of $2.5 billion in annual profits in the first half of this year, according to Bloomberg calculations. That figure marks an 87% decline from the $19.2 billion in profits those same companies earned in the first half of 2021, and a 53% drop from the $5.3 billion in profits they earned in the latter half of last year.

    The meager profits from the first half of this year are barely higher than the $2.4 billion developers earned in the latter half of 2008 amid the global financial crisis. This year’s $2.5 billion in semiannual profits are also a small fraction of what the firms earned at the peak of China’s property market in the second half of 2020, when developers pocketed $30.9 billion.
    …
    https://fortune.com/2022/09/02/china-property-developers-housing-market-real-estate/

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