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Realtors Have Had To Slash Selling Prices Because They Need Cash

A report from Realtor.com. “The red-hot housing market has been brought to its knees by soaring mortgage interest rates. ‘No one wants to catch a falling knife,’ says economist Yelena Maleyev of KPMG US. ‘No one wants to buy in a market when prices are falling. You want to wait it out.'”

From CNBC. “New U.S. home listings in the month, through Nov. 6, were down 17.5% compared to the same period a year earlier, according to Redfin, a real estate brokerage. The typical sales price, $359,000, was down over 8% from its $392,000 peak in June, according to Redfin.”

The Boston Herald. “The Massachusetts housing market kept rapidly cooling through October, according to newly released Massachusetts Association of Realtors reports. Single family home sales plummeted 22% for the month compared to October 2021, the reports detailed, while prices took a steeper 4% tumble from September. Prices have been on a modest downward trend since summer, going from the $626,000 median single-family home price peak in June to $547,000 last month.”

From Boston.com. “Amid this climate, sales have gone off a cliff. ‘Sellers are increasingly cutting prices and offering concessions to attract a greater number of buyers,’ the Massachusetts Association of Realtors said. Drilling down into the town-by-town sales numbers, the median condo price in Boston proper was down 6.8% year over year in October, steady in Cambridge, and 5.4% less in Quincy. In Newton, the median single-family home price slipped 4.7% year over year, while next door in Needham, prices plummeted 33.7%. That’s based on six fewer home sales, but let that sink in.”

“‘The market has started to normalize. The days of waiving home inspections, multiple offers with intense bidding wars, and properties selling before they’ve been listed or shown are over,’ said Melvin A. Vieira Jr.,  GBAR president. ‘Buyers now have room for negotiation and are proceeding much more cautiously. As a result, we’re seeing more price adjustments and longer listing times before a sale. The rapid, double-digit annual price gains that were occurring as recently as this spring have come to an end.'”

The Orlando Sentinel in Florida. “Orlando’s housing market has slowed to a crawl with home prices and sales essentially flat in October and inventory continuing to inch up, according to a new report. Inventory rose 3.5% to 7,128, the eighth straight month of increases and more than double the amount year over year. Inventory has been clawing its way back from a historically low point over the past two years, something Altamonte Springs-based real estate agent Joseph Pacholski says is gradually returning Orlando’s market to normal.”

“Slow is something of a watchword these days, Pacholski said. Where once homes were getting multiple offers the first day they were listed, ‘those days seem to have disappeared,’ he said. Homes spent an average of 38 days on market in October, according to the association report, up from 31 days in September and 20 days at the peak of the market in June. ‘The sellers are frozen in time,’ Pacholski said.”

From Candy’s Dirt. “Amid the backdrop of high inflation, elevated mortgage rates, and slowing sales activity, severely limited housing inventory will prevent large home price drops for most of the country next year, according to NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun. ‘For most parts of the country, home prices are holding steady since available inventory is extremely low,’ Yun said. ‘Some places are experiencing price gains, while some places, most notably in California, are seeing prices pull back.'”

From Fortune.com. “Back in July, Redfin paid $610,000 for this two-bedroom single-family home in Las Vegas. Just weeks later, Redfin put it back on the market with a $674,900 price tag. However, it was too late: Las Vegas was already slipping into a home price correction. Fast-forward to November, and the property remains unsold with a $499,900 list price—or -18% below its purchase price. Flippers and homebuilders are scrambling to move inventory in markets like Las Vegas—where home values are down -6.93% since its 2022 peak.”

“Among the country’s 400 biggest housing markets, 219 have seen home values fall off their 2022 peak. The average decline being -2%. High-cost markets along the West Coast. Places like San Francisco (where home values are down -8.18%), Santa Cruz (-7.58%), and Seattle (-6.28%). According to John Burns Real Estate Consulting, those markets are hyper mortgage rate sensitive. In many cases, they’re hit by a double whammy: Not only are their high-end real estate markets more rate-sensitive, but so are their tech sectors. Between March 2020 and May 2022, Austin saw its home values soar 75.36%. Since, it has taken a -10.21% hair cut.”

Bisnow Dallas Fort Worth in Texas. “By nearly all measures, Dallas-Fort Worth’s retail market is on the upswing. But toiling behind the scenes is a scrappy gang of tenants, landlords and brokers scrambling to make the numbers work as rising costs threaten to snuff out deals. Now, as consumers tighten their belts, those rates are increasingly unsustainable. ‘Inflation is cannibalizing disposable incomes,’ RSC Real Estate Advisors Managing Director Ed Coury said. ‘If you’ve just opened a new store, and you overpaid, or you paid based on very elevated sales expectations, you could be sitting there going, the consumers are not shopping like they were. They’re spending their money elsewhere.'”

“Solutions for getting cash-strapped tenants through the door have become essential as inflation intensifies and interest rates go up, said Phillip Hooks Jr., a partner at retail brokerage and development firm Advisors Commercial Real Estate. As demand wanes and the delivery of new product slows, Hooks expect rents to come down, which will provide much-needed cost relief for all parties involved. ‘I think it levels out,’ he said. ‘There’s still a lot of deals being done in the marketplace right now. But once those deals are finally executed, you’ll start to really see a slowdown.'”

From CBC News. “Canada’s housing market continued its slowdown last month, with the volume of home sales down by more than a third compared to the boom times of last year — and prices down by almost 10 per cent since then, too. The Canadian Real Estate Association, which represents Realtors, said Tuesday that the national average selling price of a home that sold in October went for $644,643. That’s down by 9.9 per cent compared to the same month a year earlier, and down by even more from the peak of $816,720 in February 2022.”

“That was before the Bank of Canada began its aggressive campaign of hiking interest rates to rein in inflation. The central bank has raised its benchmark rate a half dozen times since then, and the impact on the housing market has been dramatic. Average selling prices are down by more than 20 per cent since February, with prices down in just about every market across the country, or flat in a few.”

“Sid Joshi bought a townhouse in Stittsville, a suburb of Ottawa, in February for about $400,000. Prior to the pandemic, the home he bought probably would have only cost about $300,000, but he found the courage to buy because he wanted to start building equity, and he could easily afford the mortgage payment. ‘When I bought the the condo, the interest rates were 1.2 per cent, so my monthly payment was still manageable [at] $1,400 per month,’ he said.”

“But the loan he agreed to was a variable rate one, and within weeks, his payment starting going up with each Bank of Canada rate hike. He’s now paying more than $2,100 a month,  and even worse for him, he thinks his home might only fetch $360,000, based on recent sales. ‘It’s very discouraging and I regret my decision of buying this property,’ he said. ‘I should have waited.’ His tale is likely familiar to many Canadians who bought during the pandemic, when record-low interest rates poured gasoline on to the red-hot housing market, driving prices higher.”

“‘This was the quietest for unit volumes since the economy was climbing out of recession in 2010,’ BMO economist Robert Kavcic noted.’Tumbleweeds continued to blow across the Canadian housing market in October,’ he said. ‘But it could be worse.'”

The Globe and Mail. “The Bank of Canada will report its first financial loss in its 87-year history in the coming weeks. The central bank is expecting total losses of between $5-billion and $6-billion over the next few years, spokesperson Paul Badertscher said. ‘Roughly estimated, the bank should return to positive net interest income sometime in 2024 or 2025,’ he added. The Bank of Canada is not alone. Central banks around the world have begun reporting large losses in recent months as they wind down pandemic-era bond buying programs, while also rapidly raising interest rates to combat high inflation.”

“The losses are an unintended consequence of the central bank’s quantitative easing (QE) program, a monetary policy tool aimed at holding down interest rates, which caused its balance sheet to balloon during the pandemic. Other central banks have already begun reporting losses – both net interest losses and direct losses from selling bonds whose value has dropped as interest rates have risen. In September, the Reserve Bank of Australia recorded an 36.7-billion Australian dollar accounting loss for the year, leaving it with a negative-equity position of 12.4-billion Australian dollars. In October, the British government earmarked more than £11-billion to transfer to the Bank of England, to cover its losses.”

“Returning to profitability means rebalancing the central bank’s mix of assets and liabilities. That could take some time. If the bank sold its assets outright, it would trigger massive losses totalling some $31-billion, according to its second-quarter financial statements. Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem has said the bank intends to hold bonds to maturity and let the balance sheet shrink over time.”

From ABC Business. “Regions that became pandemic property ‘hotspots’ have led sharp falls in Queensland’s housing market in the latest quarter, new data has revealed. CoreLogic’s regional market update reported sharp declines in the price of houses in some of Australia’s most popular regional markets in the three months to October. The Sunshine Coast recorded the highest fall in regional Queensland, down 7.1 per cent, followed by the Gold Coast, where house prices dropped by 6.4 per cent.”

“CoreLogic’s head of research in Australia, Eliza Owens, said house prices across regional Queensland suffered a downturn over the past quarter, declining by 5 per cent overall from a peak in June. ‘That high-end expensive, lifestyle area of the regional Queensland market is really now leading a decline,’ she said.”

From Vietnam.net. “Some brokers are offering unprecedented prices for shophouses in a project in the southern province of Dong Nai, with prices 50 percent lower than primary prices. For example, products with an initial price of VND15 billion are being offered at VND7.5 billion, and VND13 billion products are now priced at VND6 billion. However, to get the price, buyers have to pay up to 95 percent immediately.”

“An apartment project in Thu Duc City (HCM City) is being offered for VND70 million per 1sqm. For a 70sqm apartment of VND5 billion, if buyers pay 51 percent of the value immediately, they will enjoy discounts worth VND830 million. The developer will pay an interest rate of 24 percent on early payment amounts to buyers until they receive the apartment. If buyers pay 98 percent of the value immediately, they will enjoy a discount of 45 percent.”

“For buyers of apartments of a project in the southern province of Binh Duong, they will get 1,000 sqm of land in the Central Highlands province of Gia Lai as gifts if they buy from two apartments. This policy is for the first 20 customers. Many other real estate developers in HCM City and southern provinces also offer similar policies to attract buyers. The prices offered by brokers are usually 10-20 percent lower than the original prices.”

“Also, individual investors have lowered housing prices. N, who bought a 60sqm apartment for VND2.2 billion two years ago, is offering the apartment at the same price but he has not found a buyer. Tran Khanh Quang, a real estate expert, said realtors have had to slash selling prices because they need cash, as credit and bond issuance has tightened. Loan interest rates have increased, while liquidity has decreased over the past few months. For a discount rate of up to 50 percent offered by some distributors, Dinh The Hien, a respected expert, said that real estate firms can still make a profit but speculators may take a loss.”

From Reuters. “South Korea’s housing prices fell at the sharpest rate in at least 19 years in October. In the capital Seoul, apartment prices declined 1.24%, the fastest since December 2008, extending losses to a ninth straight month. The national index for apartment transaction prices dropped 7.13% during the January-September period, on track for the biggest annual decline since that data was introduced in 2006. Over the past five years, Seoul home prices more than doubled in what began as a stimulus-fuelled search for homes and turned into a national pastime, even as heavier loan restrictions threw many millennials into financial distress.”

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This Post Has 107 Comments

  1. ‘Single family home sales plummeted 22% for the month compared to October 2021, the reports detailed, while prices took a steeper 4% tumble from September. Prices have been on a modest downward trend since summer, going from the $626,000 median single-family home price peak in June to $547,000 last month’

    No mention of the % drop from June? Typical MA REIC tactics.

  2. ‘He’s now paying more than $2,100 a month, and even worse for him, he thinks his home might only fetch $360,000, based on recent sales. ‘It’s very discouraging and I regret my decision of buying this property,’ he said. ‘I should have waited.’ His tale is likely familiar to many Canadians who bought during the pandemic’

    Tiff: we needed the growth.

    ‘Returning to profitability means rebalancing the central bank’s mix of assets and liabilities. That could take some time. If the bank sold its assets outright, it would trigger massive losses totalling some $31-billion, according to its second-quarter financial statements. Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem has said the bank intends to hold bonds to maturity and let the balance sheet shrink over time’

    Stand yer ground Tiff, don’t give it away.

  3. ‘For most parts of the country, home prices are holding steady since available inventory is extremely low…Some places are experiencing price gains, while some places, most notably in California, are seeing prices pull back’

    Larry is a stopped clock perma bear doom and gloomer. Don’t believe him Thornberg.

    ‘Among the country’s 400 biggest housing markets, 219 have seen home values fall off their 2022 peak. The average decline being -2%. High-cost markets along the West Coast. Places like San Francisco (where home values are down -8.18%), Santa Cruz (-7.58%), and Seattle (-6.28%)…Between March 2020 and May 2022, Austin saw its home values soar 75.36%. Since, it has taken a -10.21% hair cut’

  4. ‘Where once homes were getting multiple offers the first day they were listed, ‘those days seem to have disappeared’

    ‘The days of waiving home inspections, multiple offers with intense bidding wars, and properties selling before they’ve been listed or shown are over’

    Where did they go Melvin?

  5. ‘N, who bought a 60sqm apartment for VND2.2 billion two years ago, is offering the apartment at the same price but he has not found a buyer’

    N, meet Dinh:

    ‘For a discount rate of up to 50 percent offered by some distributors, Dinh The Hien, a respected expert, said that real estate firms can still make a profit but speculators may take a loss’

  7. Just one example of persistent unrealistic seller expectations in the Pensacola, FL area:

    https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4748-Spencer-Oaks-Blvd-Pace-FL-32571/70808964_zpid/

    There was an open house in August, but apparently no greater fool came along.

    ============================================
    9/19/2022 Price change $444,900 (-4.3%) $165/sqft

    8/19/2022 Price change $464,900 (-2.1%) $172/sqft

    7/27/2022 Listed for sale $475,000 (+35.3%) $176/sqft

    3/4/2022 Sold $351,000 (0%) $130/sqft

    7/7/2005 Sold $159,200 $59/sqft

  8. ‘No one wants to catch a falling knife,’ says economist Yelena Maleyev of KPMG US. ‘No one wants to buy in a market when prices are falling. You want to wait it out.’”

    But…but…Always Be Closing!

  9. Single family home sales plummeted 22% for the month compared to October 2021, the reports detailed, while prices took a steeper 4% tumble from September.

    Is that a lot?

  10. “Orlando’s housing market has slowed to a crawl with home prices and sales essentially flat in October and inventory continuing to inch up, according to a new report.

    It’s just a gully.

  11. ‘For most parts of the country, home prices are holding steady since available inventory is extremely low,’ Yun said.

    Realtors are liars.

  12. Fast-forward to November, and the property remains unsold with a $499,900 list price—or -18% below its purchase price.

    I fear there is a very real possibility Redfin will lose money on this transaction.

    2. Kinda funny how there was this massive inventory shortage and bidding wars and lots of buyers until all of a sudden money wasn’t free and all the iBuyers became iSellers and now there are no buyers. Almost like it was all just fake demand from “free’ money losing tech platforms.

      But no, that’s crazy talk.

  14. A reader sent these in:

    Globalists first
    Designer shirts, parties, the high life at expense of the taxpayer cash cow
    No pay back

    https://twitter.com/rorotrader/status/1592714578185834498

    Lumber 🌳

    https://twitter.com/WinfieldSmart/status/1592495613434023938

    Kira Mason
    @kmasonrealtor
    SE Pennsylvania. Winter is coming.

    https://twitter.com/kmasonrealtor/status/1592574148429086720

    We can track pendings to see the earliest proxy of sales that’ll complete in the future. With 314,000 homes in contract, that’s fewer than any time since early pandemic. Only 50k homes went into contract this week. That’s as slow as Christmas week usually is. 5/6

    https://twitter.com/mikesimonsen/status/1592254941154148353

    Steve Saretsky

    Here’s what hitting your trigger rate looks like at RBC. Letter in the mail with an automatic increase.

    https://twitter.com/SteveSaretsky/status/1592606606222823424

    According to a Dallas Fed paper published this afternoon, U.S. housing prices could fall 15-20% in reaction to higher interest rates…

    https://twitter.com/SpecialSitsNews/status/1592643941400465409

    CarDealershipGuy

    We deserve an asteroid

    https://twitter.com/GuyDealership/status/1592648465473212417

    Everyone wants to know when or IF this rally will run out of gas. If only there was a pattern to this decline.

    https://twitter.com/SuburbanDrone/status/1592665380480495618

    The Kobeissi Letter

    JUST IN: Total household debt jumped by $351 billion last quarter, the largest quarterly increase since 2007. This puts total household debt at a record $16.5 trillion. Mortgage balances are up a record $1 trillion this year and credit card debt is up 15%. What could go wrong?

    https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1592565116540973057

    Steve Saretsky

    National house prices fell another 1.2% in October. The home price index has dropped 15% since its peak earlier this year, the sharpest decline since the index was created in 2005. In other words, the price of a typical home has dropped $132,900 since March.

    https://twitter.com/SteveSaretsky/status/1592545837728817153

    Steve Saretsky

    Big layoffs announced at Properly, the Canadian Real Estate startup trying to disrupt the traditional brokerage model.

    https://twitter.com/SteveSaretsky/status/1592700316231028738

    Lance Lambert

    KPMG: “The bursting of the [U.S.] housing bubble has upped the risk of recession; it will also help cool inflation.”

    https://twitter.com/NewsLambert/status/1592703810224664578

    Some home

    owners are going to find out what it feels like to “trapped” in a house. Unable to move due to either having negative equity or mortgage replacement cost. Btw…chart of elevated mortgage servicing costs relative to disposable incomes is terrifying.

    https://twitter.com/RMSGarey/status/1592612453472358401

    The similarities to 2008 (and 2020) keep piling up!

    https://twitter.com/InvariantPersp1/status/1592715663193559041

    Lance Lambert

    Among the country’s biggest housing markets, Austin (down -10.21%) has seen the biggest decline.

    https://twitter.com/NewsLambert/status/1592520952470179840

    Homebuyers Need $107,000 Annually to Afford the Typical U.S. Home–Up 46% From a Year Ago. This is due to high mortgage rates and persistently high home prices. The increases are especially big in Florida.

    https://twitter.com/TaylorAMarr/status/1592542226168807427

  15. Prior to the pandemic, the home he bought probably would have only cost about $300,000, but he found the courage to buy because he wanted to start building equity, and he could easily afford the mortgage payment.

    Never confuse “courage” with stupidity, Real Journalist REIC shills.

  16. ‘It’s very discouraging and I regret my decision of buying this property,’ he said.

    If stupid didn’t hurt, fools would never learn, Sid with a girl’s name.

  17. Central banks around the world have begun reporting large losses in recent months as they wind down pandemic-era bond buying programs, while also rapidly raising interest rates to combat high inflation.”

    A complete financial collapse would be worth it if these criminal central bankers were finally held accountable for their fiat currency swindles.

  18. “Some brokers are offering unprecedented prices for shophouses in a project in the southern province of Dong Nai, with prices 50 percent lower than primary prices.

    Gosh, I hope that doesn’t lead to friction between new buyers and FBs who paid full price.

  19. Over the past five years, Seoul home prices more than doubled in what began as a stimulus-fuelled search for homes and turned into a national pastime, even as heavier loan restrictions threw many millennials into financial distress.”

    The verdict is in: Millennials are the most worthless generation in human history.

  23. Watching all the crypto baggies realize at roughly the same time that they’ve been HODLing scam digital gambling tokens with an intrinsic value of zero is going to be comedy gold. Got popcorn?

    https://twitter.com/FinanceLancelot/status/1592884185248956417

    Seeing real panic now as pumpers are telling people to pull everything off exchanges.

    The don’t seem to grasp if 10% pull funds the exchanges collapse and if exchanges collapse crypto goes to $0.

    These aren’t structural institutions, they’re casinos. There’s no bailout coming.

    1. Seeing real panic now as pumpers are telling people to pull everything off exchanges.

      So what’s true – panic, or the report yesterday of the highest inflows into crypto in 14 weeks? There’s a lot of BS out there. From a price perspective, the money running INTO crypto seems more likely. After all, how can you uncover a PONZI so large and have the price holding up just fine like nothing happened?

        1. I absolutely agree, which is why I don’t see anything even approaching “panic” right now. We’re still right in the midst of the biggest credit/asset bubble/mania in history.

          When we see true panic in crypto, it will be an elevator drop straight down.

      1. Agreed. A sham investigation will find “mistakes were made,” but no criminal prosecution. Fraudsters like this are too “systemically important” to the Deep State & Democrat-Bolsheviks.

        2. I wouldn’t be too quick to write off prison time on this one. A significant number of well heeled entities have a serious credibility problem now because of this twerp. There will be some bruised egos that can easily afford teams of attorneys. It is going to be interesting to see how it plays out.

  25. Homebuilder sentiment index – buyer traffic is particularly weak. However price cuts are only 1/2 of the 2008 recession – so need to keep falling

    Homebuilder sentiment in the single-family housing market fell to the lowest level in a decade in November, as builders continue to struggle with higher costs for labor and materials and lower demand from homebuyers.

    A monthly sentiment index from the National Association of Home Builders dropped 5 points from October to 33. That is the eleventh straight monthly decline and the lowest level since June 2012, with the exception of a very brief drop at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic that was followed by a strong rebound.

    A year ago, builder sentiment stood at 83.

    Of the index’s three components, current sales conditions fell 6 points to 39, and sales expectations for the next six months dropped 4 points to 31. Buyer traffic fell 5 points to 20.

    “Higher interest rates have significantly weakened demand for new homes as buyer traffic is becoming increasingly scarce,” said NAHB Chairman Jerry Konter, a homebuilder and developer from Savannah, Georgia.
    …
    In addition 37% of builders cut prices in November, up from 26% in September, with an average price of reduction of 6%. However, the price cuts are only about half of what builders offered in 2008 during the housing crash and Great Recession.

  26. Price your house at today’s market value | The Perreault Group – Portland, Oregon
    Lauren Perreault
    Nov 15, 2022
    Looking to sell your house quickly? Check with The Perreault Group to get an accurate price today! We specialize in pricing homes quickly and getting them sold in Portland, Oregon.

    From staging your home to getting the right exposure, we’ll do everything we can to get your house sold quickly and at the best possible price. Contact us today to get started!
    Looking to sell your house quickly? Check with The Perreault Group to get an accurate price today! We specialize in pricing homes quickly and getting them sold in Portland, Oregon.From staging your home to getting the right exposure, we’ll do everything we can to get your house sold quickly and at the best possible price. Contact us today to get started!Looking to sell your house quickly? Check with The Perreault Group to get an accurate price today! We specialize in pricing homes quickly and getting them sold in Portland, Oregon.From staging your home to getting the right exposure, we’ll do everything we can to get your house sold quickly and at the best possible price. Contact us today to get started!It is important to price your home at today’s market value. This will ensure that you are not overpricing or underpricing your home and will help you attract potential buyers.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS8wbDfF54s

    1:16.

    1. Libs are trying to split the vote between Trump and DeSantis. I’m hoping for the sake of anyone actually winning that DeSantis doesn’t try it.

      1. There will only be one Republican nominee for the General Election and they will have my vote no matter who remains.
        Split only occurs in primaries.

  29. Walk through a door held open by Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol Police and you end up being held without bail for a couple years awaiting trial in the dungeon of despair.

    Frank Zappa – Torture Never Stops

    https://youtu.be/TdbtZqEyE7U

    A tiny light from a window hole a hundred yards away
    Is all they ever get to know about the regular life in the day;
    An’ it stinks so bad the stones been chokin’
    ‘N weepin’ greenish drops
    In the room where the giant fire puffer works
    ‘N the torture never stops
    The torture never stops

  30. Oh, the pain!

    “Bitcoin Slides After Genesis Suspends Withdrawals From Crypto Lending Business”

    https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/depite-140-millon-cash-injection-genesis-suspends-withdrawals-crypto-lending-business

    (snip)

    The fallout from Sam Bankman-Fried’s massive farce continues as crypto brokerage Genesis suspends withdrawals from its lending business.

    On Oct 10th, Genesis trading revealed that its derivatives business had around $175 million worth of funds locked away in an FTX trading account (hit by its exposure to bankrupt crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, to which it had made a $2.4 billion loan).

    On Nov 10th, Genesis trading announced that it will receive an additional equity infusion of $140 million from its parent company, Digital Currency Group. According to the company, this decision was made to “strengthen its balance sheet” and boost its “position as a global leader in crypto capital markets.”

    (blah blah blah)

    1. We had a new theory from IPF yesterday. Kind of a variation of the previous theory. Let’s call the new theory “the sheltered low intelligence meth-smoking a$$clown with Asperger’s theory”. To simplify, let’s just work with the low intelligence a$$clown variables.

      The US has a population of about 300 million. Let’s say 1% are low intelligence a$$clowns. In my experience, it’s more than that but we’ll be conservative. That gives us over three million low intelligence a$$clowns to choose from.

      So, IPF, can you identify one other low intelligence a$$clown from this pool who has set up a multibillion dollar technology-based enterprise in their twenties and forged financial partnerships with influential global organizations like the WEF and with governments of major countries like the Ukraine with a population of 40 million people and used the resources at their disposal to launder hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars? Or something even remotely similar? This person doesn’t even have to smoke meth or have Aspergers or been raised in a dysfunctional home. Hmmmm. There isn’t one is there?

      If you could identify one other low intelligence a$$clown with a similar resume, that would raise the chances of you being correct to about 1 in 1.5 million. Which is a lot more than zero chance. Which appears to be the case. I mean there must be low intelligence a$$clowns all over the place doing stuff like this, right? I mean there are millions of them. Low intelligence a$$clowns must be creating these kinds of catastrophes every day. Imagine what an even medium intelligence a$$clown could do. Create a trillion dollar enterprise to rival Apple by inventing the first mind-controlled affordable electric flying car which can circle the globe on one charge?

      But you are right IPF he is an a$$clown. But an a$$clown left to his own devices couldn’t pull this off. So the question is who did. Who were the accomplices? What kind of organization would have the sophistication and international influence to set up a multibillion dollar trading platform, launder all this money, and AVOID ALL REGULATORY SCRUTINY in multiple countries at the same time? Any guesses? There really is only one possible answer. Dude, it’s so obvious. The whole thing was a scam from the jump and this dork with man tits is a cut out, a distraction.

      2. I responded to your post in yesterday’s thread a few minutes ago but I will respond with the short version here and then I think I am done on this because it is all just too ridiculous. You specifically posted a link a couple days ago as evidence of your claims but apparently you didn’t actually read your own link because multiple sources in it say your exchange creating genius was an autist and had serious mental issues. So you have already posted exactly what you are asking me to show you. Your other links didn’t bolster your case either but I enjoyed the show so thanks!

        You seem to be prone to fantasy thinking. How much have you lost on crypto so far?

        1. “How much have you lost on crypto so far?”

          Call him by his real name Sam Bank-Fraud.

          Crypto is worthless. All of it…

          2. @BlueSky – no hidden meaning, this is a housing blog so not everyone is interested and my links often get deleted. I am going to *try* to stay on topic now. (I will probably fail.)

        3. If retail savings accounts paid 5% crypto would not be an investment scheme. Things went afoul when the fed decided to screw savers and responsible main street small businesses to rescue Wall street’s corruption and fraud.

  31. “US Homebuilder Confidence Collapses In October, Future Sales Hope Hits Decade-Lows”

    https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/us-homebuilder-confidence-collapses-october-future-sales-hope-hits-decade-lows-0

    (snip)

    It appears delusion and hope can only last so long – even when one’s salary depends on it – as US homebuilder confidence crashed to COVID lockdown lows in November after refusing to see what everyone else was seeing more months.. and what homebuyers were clearly feeling as prices soared along with mortgage rates and devastated affordability for most Americans. Against expectations of a small drop from 38 in October to 36 in October, the headline confidence index tumbled to 33 – the lowest in a decade outside of the nadir of the COVID crisis…

    1. It would be appropriate for AZ to finish counting the vote.

      California is rubbing it in our faces not counting the vote for the House. Never saw anything like it.

      1. I hope the House opens investigations into Joe Biden and his Ukraine corruption, simultaneously working on Fauci as well.

    1. The Financial Times
      Crypto broker Genesis Trading halts withdrawals at lending unit
      Group blames ‘unprecedented market turmoil’ in wake of FTX collapse
      A physical imitation of bitcoins
      Genesis is one of the biggest financial services providers in the crypto market
      Nikou Asgari and Philip Stafford in London an hour ago

      Genesis Trading, a large crypto financial services group, has halted withdrawals at its lending unit, blaming the “unprecedented market turmoil” caused by the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s corporate empire.

      The group said on Wednesday that its decision to suspend redemptions and new loan originations came after it faced “abnormal withdrawal requests which have exceeded our current liquidity”.

      The troubles at Genesis are the latest sign that the failure of Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange and Alameda Research, a trading firm, is sending shockwaves across the crypto industry. On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives Financial Services Committee announced a hearing into the collapse of FTX and its impact on the digital asset industry.

      Genesis plays a key role in digital asset fixed income markets. The New York-based group allows clients to lend out their coins in exchange for yields of as much as 10 per cent, while also providing similar services for groups including exchanges operator Gemini. On the other side of the ledger, it lends coins to institutions such as hedge funds and family offices.

      Genesis had $2.8bn of “active loans” as of the third quarter of 2022, according to its website.

      “This decision was made in response to the extreme market dislocation and loss of industry confidence caused by the FTX implosion,” said Genesis’ parent company, Digital Currency Group, which is owned by billionaire Barry Silbert.
      ….

    2. SBF (FTX CEO) has put up a twitter thread (see below). Good thing that commercial real estate doesnt have leverage issues with current CAP rates 🙂

      Hard to believe that this joker was once worth $18B

      SBF
      @SBF_FTX
      21) And problems were brewing. Larger than I realized.

      [AGAIN THESE NUMBERS ARE APPROXIMATE, TO THE BEST OF MY KNOWLEDGE, ETC.]

      Leverage built up– ~$5b of leverage, backed by ~$20b of assets which were….

      Well, they had value. FTT had value, in EV! But they had risk.

      22) And that risk was correlated–with the other collateral, and with the platform.

      And then the crash came.

      In a few day period, there was a historic crash–over 50% in most correlated assets, with no bid side liquidity.

      And at the same time there was a run on the bank.

      23) Roughly 25% of customer assets were withdrawn each day–$4b.

      As it turned out, I was wrong: leverage wasn’t ~$5b, it was ~$13b.

      $13b leverage, total run on the bank, total collapse in asset value, all at once.

      Which is why you don’t want that leverage.

      1. The Financial Times
        FTX Trading Ltd
        Scaramucci’s SkyBridge bought $10mn of FTX token in return for investment
        Fund group received $45mn from Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto venture in September
        Anthony Scaramucci speaks on stage at an event
        Anthony Scaramucci, left, founder of SkyBridge Capital, which recently sold a 30% stake to FTX
        Ortenca Aliaj in New York and Joshua Oliver in London 6 hours ago

        FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried told Anthony Scaramucci to buy digital tokens created by his cryptocurrency exchange as a condition for him taking a 30 per cent stake in SkyBridge Capital, in an early sign he was trying to support the coin’s price, according to three people with knowledge of the agreement.

        The Scaramucci-led fund manager SkyBridge bought $10mn worth of FTT, the token issued by FTX, two of the people said.

        The bankruptcy of FTX after a liquidity crisis in the past week has rocked the cryptocurrency industry, sparking investigations by global regulators and leaving behind as many as 1mn creditors.

        Until recently Bankman-Fried was viewed as a billionaire backer of the crypto industry. He also came to the rescue of SkyBridge, which has over the past two years invested heavily in crypto under Scaramucci’s leadership.

        The deal Bankman-Fried and Scaramucci announced in September involved FTX Ventures paying $45mn for a 30 per cent stake in SkyBridge. Under the terms of the agreement, SkyBridge was obliged to spend $40mn buying cryptocurrencies.

        Scaramucci at the time said the transaction was proof that SkyBridge had a long-term future. “If you have $50mn in liquid assets on your balance sheet, people don’t think you’re going out of business,” he told reporters in September at his Salt financial conference in New York.
        …

        1. Bitcoinist.com
          Breaking News: Another One Bites The Dust: Genesis Halts Operations Due To FTX Impact
          FTT Token
          Nexo
          FTT Token Volatility Remains High, Is This The Next LUNC?
          By Best Owie
          2 days ago

          FTT Token remains one of the worst performers in the crypto market this week. The token is already down more than 80% from its last week’s price and continues to show very bearish trends. Now, there has been some recovery for the token in the last day but the volatility still remains high. The price of the coin is yet to hit below zero like LUNC did but the collapse of the FTX exchange suggests that this may be the next LUNC in the making.

          A Gambler’s Token

          Over the last couple of days, the profitability of FTT tokens has taken a hit. It had fallen to a cycle low of $2, leaving billions of dollars in losses in its wake. This has pushed the total market cap of FTT down below $630 million and its fully diluted market cap at around $673 million as 100% of the token supply was reported to be already fully unlocked.
          …
          https://bitcoinist.com/ftt-token-volatility-remains-high/

    4. They Pulled Money Out of FTX at the Last Minute Before Its Bankruptcy: ‘Thank God I Dodged It Twice’

      Cryptocurrencies
      Bitcoin Drops After Genesis Suspends Withdrawals Amid FTX Fallout
      By Adam Clark
      Nov. 17, 2022 4:07 am ET

      Bitcoin shed more value amid the fallout from the collapse of the FTX exchange. While the Genesis cryptocurrency platform became the latest to temporarily suspend withdrawals as it struggles with liquidity.

      Bitcoin (BTCUSD –0.18%) is down around 1.1% in the past 24 hours to less than $16,600. It remains well above the lows of around $15,800 hit after the announcement of FTX filing for bankruptcy last week.

      Cryptocurrencies
      Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger: Crypto and FTX Investing Is ‘Partly Fraud and Partly Delusion’
      By Weston Blasi, MarketWatch
      Nov. 16, 2022 4:29 pm ET

      “The country did not need a currency that’s good for kidnappers.”

      Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B –0.39%) (ticker: BRK.A, BRK.B), is not a big fan of crypto, and he shared some frank thoughts about it in the wake of the FTX bankruptcy filing.
      …
      https://www.barrons.com/articles/why-do-people-invest-in-crypto-its-partly-fraud-and-partly-delusion-says-charlie-munger-11668529929

  36. Interesting (to me at least) real-estate industry trends.

    In September, 36% of restaurants couldn’t pay their rent, while in August and July, the number was 46% and 45%, respectively. New data from Alignable shows that rent delinquency among all small businesses jumped by 7% in October, with restaurants well above the national U.S. average of 37% of small business owners who couldn’t pay. Only the automotive and education sectors fared worse than restaurants on the month.
    https://www.nrn.com/fast-casual/nearly-half-small-restaurant-businesses-couldn-t-pay-rent-october

    In October, 37% of real estate agents struggled to pay rent on their offices — a 10% increase from the month before.

    To be sure, it’s a competitive career — the National Association of Realtors saw its membership rise to an all-time high of 1.56 million in 2021 — up from 1.49 million the year before. But with the available inventory dropping off a cliff and interest rates on the rise, many agents are floundering.
    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/37-real-estate-agents-us-143000343.html

    1. Will NAR ever raise the bar and conduct their recruiting efforts somewhere besides state and federal parole offices?

  37. “The Age Of Easy Money Is Over”

    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/age-easy-money-over

    (snip snip snip snip)

    What began in 2008 and continued for the better part of 14 years appears finally to be coming to an end. The era of cheap money and credit is over.

    It’s hard to wrap one’s brain around the implications. It will affect all of business life and personal finances. It will dramatically change financial decisions and also affect the culture. It’s going to amount to a return to good-sense, value investing, and companies that have to actually make a profit the old-fashioned way.

    I’m not just talking about layoffs in Big Tech. But those are very real. Amazon is laying off 10,000 workers in management layers—which everyone in corporate America knows are the the most useless people in any business. They got puffed up beyond reasonable size completely due to seemingly infinite resources and forever rising stock valuations based on nothing but inflated reputations.

    Such cutbacks are occurring in every major company that reached gargantuan size. Twitter was just the beginning because soon after Facebook (sorry, Meta) announced the same, while many other companies that lived off ad revenue on the internet are experiencing the profitability squeeze as we headed into a solid recession (it will become obvious in months that we are already there).

    It also affects real estate, the residential markets of which are already freezing up. And commercial real estate in big cities is similarly affected, particularly offices that are still only half-full. Lacking a buyers’ market, prices will have to come down relative to where they are today, though they are likely to remain inflated over valuations from 2019 due to persistent inflation that is only very gradually calming down.

    The huge issue today concerns the rate of return on the safest place to park and move money, namely U.S. debt. For nearly a decade and a half now, short-term interest rates have been negative. This is without precedent. It amounts to the loosest-possible monetary policy. By incentivizing capital to chase anything but safety, and discouraging savings in all forms, finance received a huge boost. But so did everything else, including crypto.

    Looking back, it seems obvious that the craze for extreme risk, the who-cares attitude about the pace of business expansion, the magic-beans environment of digital tech, the claims that society has somehow managed to commoditize attention without committing resources, not to mention out-of-control government spending—all of this was propped up by zero-interest rate policies adopted after the last housing market crash.

    The innovation perhaps seemed costless at the time. Ben Bernanke came up with the idea. Drive rates to zero to spare the financial system and macroeconomic environment but suppress the normal inflation that would follow through an accounting trick. The Fed would pay a higher than market rate to banks to keep their assets at the Fed, which would lock them away to keep them from creating inflationary pressure. For this great innovation, he was heralded as a genius.

    What was the downside? For a while, it seemed like there was none. Savings did not fully collapse beyond their previous level simply because inflation was in check. And yet keeping money in Treasuries was no place for return. So money and capital went on a wild hunt for the whole of the 2010s, times when anything seemed possible both in finance and government. Rates were zero, homes were affordable, and credit was plentiful for everything and everyone.

    Every kid could go to any college and rack up six figures of debt learning quasi-Marxist social theory, and porting that over to the workplace where high-flying fancy firms would employ them at high salaries to be clever on Slack and otherwise push woke philosophy. It was in this period that academia was flush with money and no longer had to worry about customers, so it began the great purge of conservative thinkers or anyone who disputed any aspect of the new religion.

    So too it went in the corporate world, which came to dismiss old-fashioned concerns like serving customers and stockholders and instead pushed philanthropy and alignment with social and climate justice. It was this environment of infinite plenty that encouraged this simply because the possibilities seemed limitless and there seemed to be no cost at all.

    It was precisely during this period of paper-fueled illusion that ESG and DEI were adopted by the best and brightest as central concerns in corporate life, and the experts at the World Economic Forum were on hand to pronounce that balancing the books is not nearly as important as signaling all the right virtues. Media backed up the craze at every step.

    All of this was made possible by Bernanke’s scheme. To appreciate how radical it was, we can adjust the federal funds rate by inflation and look back to the end of World War II and see. Rates very rarely went into negative territory except in the 1970s owing to high inflation. But once that problem was fixed, rates rewarded savers and kept economic rationality at the forefront from the 1980s to 1990s. These times were denounced as cowboy capitalism but the truth is that savings were high and value investing was popular. The prosperity of those years was on a firmer footing than anything that followed.

    After 2008, all bets were off. We plunged ever further into the abyss of negative rates. The Fed itself ballooned up a balance sheet as never before—effectively stuffing underperforming assets in every closet and filling up the basement too.

    It was unsustainable, obviously, and the Fed planned an escape which began in 2019. It did not last thanks to the pandemic response, which called on the Fed to do the unthinkable. It went crazier than before. This time the destination of the new money was different. Instead of cold storage, the new money flooded the streets as hot money to spend right away.

    The Bernanke chicken finally came home to roost, 14 years later and following massive damage to economic structures, financial markets, time horizons, and the culture at large. Everything awful had enjoyed a vast financial subsidy: bogus corporate ideological binging, fake credentialing, fashionable socialistic philosophizing, and bad science. Bernanke’s seemingly costless policy created a world unhinged from reality.

    After all these years, we now see the cost in intolerable levels of inflation. The Fed needs to put an end to it by driving up real rates above zero. That is going to require far more than what it has done so far. And to really repair the damage will require many years of restoration of balance sheets, a reshuffling of the workforce from fake to real jobs, and a return of sanity in financial markets and corporate culture.

    Will Jerome Powell do it? It’s very likely. He doesn’t want his legacy to be the central banker who devastated the dollar’s value. He wants to be remembered as a Paul Volcker who made the hard choices even as the whole world was screaming at him. Wall Street today keeps hoping for some respite from the war on inflation but they are hoping against hope. Powell still has a very long way to go.

    Thus does the new era of tight money begin. I can’t think of a better poetic ending to the age of excess than the disgrace of the silly man Sam Bankman-Fried and his merry band of hucksters and druggies who bamboozled the whole of the ruling class into believing that they had some kind of Midas touch to mint money to fund all the causes the hard left sees as holy. FTX died a quick and fabulous death, and with it the dreams of a fully woke pool of infinite funding.

    The transition from fantasy to reality is going to be extremely painful, not just financially but psychologically for a whole generation that imagined they could live a life untethered from all norms and rules of the past. The truth is that the dollar-based world has been living a 14-year lie. That truth is going to be a hard pill to swallow, harder to digest than Adderall, more difficult to play than League of Legends, but much more in keeping with a sustainable prosperity in the long run.

    1. Bitcoin is worthless.

      If you haven’t sold it all yet, expect to recoup nothing, because this sh*thouse is going down in FLAMES.

    2. ‘The Age Of Easy Money Is Over’

      I’m sympathetic to the cause but I have to admit I’ve heard that before.

  39. We really need to talk about “inflation”, as Alan Greenspan was trying to way back in ’96.
    Eurodollar University
    Nov 15, 2022
    All anyone heard him say was “irrational exuberance.” If only everyone had listened to all the rest which was vastly more important – and relevant to today. More slowing in October 2022 prices, producer this time, shows why we need to talk about inflation, deflation, and irrationality…at the Fed level.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWv5ShJ52jE

    21:32.

  40. “Non Fungible Tokens” are the tulip bulbs of 2022.

    You will loose everything, and starve and die and freeze living in a tent under a bridge.

    1. Not necessarily my favorite version, but I love that piece. Ennio Morricone, Rachel Portman, Mikael Nieman and Howard Shore, some of the most remarkable film music composers.

    1. “Owner Abigail Wall said the driving factors for closing the store, which opened in South Norwalk in 1987, are issues with staffing and other economic pressures that are not unique to Beadworks.“

      The employees want comprehensive medical, dental and vision plan, participate in a profit sharing plan and work from home, and our customers require disposable income before they can buy things that they don’t need and just add clutter to the home.

  45. Pennsylvania Lawmakers Vote To Impeach Philly’s Soros Prosecutor

    Josh Christenson • November 16, 2022 3:05 pm

    Pennsylvania lawmakers voted on Wednesday to impeach Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner (D.), capping a months-long campaign to remove the George Soros-backed prosecutor on the heels of a historic murder wave.

    A Republican majority passed seven articles of impeachment against Krasner almost entirely along party lines. The articles state that Krasner failed to prosecute violent offenders, withheld facts in cases, and violated victims’ rights. It now falls on the Republican-controlled state Senate to bring him to trial. Members of the upper chamber can vote to remove Krasner with a two-thirds vote.

    Krasner is the latest Soros-backed prosecutor to face a removal effort. Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón (D.), who took $4.7 million from the liberal megadonor, narrowly dodged a recall election earlier this year. And San Francisco voters in June ousted radical prosecutor Chesa Boudin (D.). Krasner received $1.7 million from Soros’s Justice and Public Safety PAC.

    Krasner has overseen fewer convictions and higher rates of recidivism since taking office in 2017. Philadelphia, which experiences nearly half of the violent crime in the state, recorded 562 homicides in 2021—its highest number to date. Murders have more than doubled in Pennsylvania since 2016.

    https://freebeacon.com/politics/pennsylvania-lawmakers-vote-to-impeach-phillys-soros-prosecutor/

    1. Business
      San Diego rents are dropping. Here’s where they are down the most
      The Townsend, a 277-unit apartment complex in Mission Valley, seen under construction in February. It is now offering one month free for some floorplans.
      (K.C. Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
      San Diego County saw major rent growth during the pandemic. Now, many markets across the U.S. are seeing declines
      By Phillip Molnar
      Nov. 15, 2022 3:02 PM PT

      Rents are down in San Diego County for the first time in years.

      The median price for a one-bedroom apartment in San Diego was down 4.6 percent to $2,500 a month, said rental website Zumper, from September to October. It was the 15th-largest drop of the 100 biggest cities the website studied.

      National rents were down nearly 1 percent in the report, with most drops spread evenly across the country. Zumper and other real estate analysts have pointed to unsustainable rent gains over the past year, fear of a recession causing renters to shop around more, and multifamily building increasing for much of the year — adding to the number of units a renter has to choose from.

      Alan Gin, an economist at the University of San Diego, said usually when the housing market becomes unaffordable for most people (like with an increase in mortgage rates), there is a rush into rentals and that keeps prices up. At least in the short term that doesn’t seem to be happening.

      “I think what we’re seeing is a slowing in the economy overall,” he said. “And that’s taking some pressure off the housing market, on the owner-occupied side and the rental side too.”

      Zumper said the one-bedroom price in San Diego was still up 21.4 percent in a year. While that is high, it isn’t the highest by a long shot. Chesapeake, Virginia, with a $1,400 median one-bedroom rent, has seen prices increase 40 percent in a year. Other big jumps: Greensboro, North Carolina, at $1,080 a month, increased 33.3 percent; and Tulsa, at $950 a month, was up by 28.4 percent.

      The biggest monthly drops were spread out across the nation, making it difficult to point to one region. Lincoln, Nebraska, (median one-bedroom, $900 a month) and Baton Rouge ($890 a month) were down the most at 6.3 percent. It was followed by Buffalo ($1,060 a month), down 6.2 percent; and San Jose ($2,600 a month), down 6.1 percent.
      …
      https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/story/2022-11-15/san-diego-rents-are-dropping-heres-where-they-are-down-the-most

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