The Market Was Booming At That Time, There Might Have Been Some Slightly Irrational Prices Being Paid

It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “New data from home selling stats shows the Southwest Pennsylvania housing market is cooling. Realtor Laurie Kelly, a 17-year real estate veteran, said the days of highballing your listing are gone. ‘They have to be very conservative now,’ Kelly said. ‘If it’s going to shift, you don’t want to be behind the eight ball. You want to price it correctly.'”

“San Diego home prices fell for a second month in July as the number of homes for sale hit its highest point of the year. Mark Goldman, a real estate analyst with C2 Financial Corp., said the home price drop was likely because of an increase in home inventory. ‘It’s all supply and demand,’ he said. ‘If you are listing your home for sale, and your neighbor is listing their home for sale, it becomes a competitor to you. The more properties that are on the market, the more competition there is. That will soften the market.'”

“Since last summer, Redfin found that homeowner’s association dues are up 17.2% in Tampa. ‘Florida Redfin agents are reporting investors aren’t buying condos anymore,’ according to Redfin. ‘Instead, those who bought condos to rent them out a few years ago are trying to offload them.’ Metropolitan areas like Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Orlando and Miami are also seeing similar upticks in condo listings and declines in prices and sales, according to Redfin’s report.”

“Earlier this year, Spencer Calvert, the owner of the Pineapple Corporation, was arrested and charged with embezzling construction funds, grand larceny and organized scheme to defraud. Prosecutors said Calvert, 52, duped more than a dozen Nocatee homeowners out of money including Captain Sandy Yawn, the star of the hit Bravo show ‘Below Deck Mediterranean.’ ‘I’d say we had to pay an extra 6 to $700,000 just to get in here and get the basics done,’ she said. More than $476,000 was converted to his personal Bank of America Account disguised as American Express reimbursements. ‘I saw that American Express bill, and I was disgusted, just and that, because that was just a glimpse of what he’s done,’ Leah Rae Yawn said. ‘$19,000 for Jags tickets, you know, $60,000 for, like, plane trips. And meanwhile, we’re stressed out and working our butts off trying to, like, just finish our home.’ They don’t expect to get a dime back from Calvert. ‘That’s kind of what we’ve been told,’ she said. ‘There’s really no money to give back, but we just want for him to pay for what he’s put us through.'”

“A New Orleans man and his neighbors face foreclosures on their homes, built by the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity. Kevin Hargrove is one of many who is fighting to keep his house. However, he says he can’t afford the soaring property insurance payments. ‘In the last year, it has skyrocketed up from the mortgage I was paying at $560 to $1,735 now. It was a major jump and set my finances back, putting me on the path of having to get another job to survive,’ Hargrove said.”

“When Adrian Washington announced last month that he was shutting down his prolific D.C. affordable housing development firm, the news was a shock to many. It was also a warning. NDC’s collapse wasn’t an isolated incident. The owners of tens of thousands of income-restricted apartments are at risk of losing their properties, jeopardizing the future of affordable housing in the nation’s capital. ‘The danger is what Adrian Washington faced, that we’re going to collapse. The whole industry could collapse,’ said CIH Properties Chairman Michael Huke, whose firm owns 2,700 units in D.C., most of them in Wards 7 and 8. ‘My thought is if this is not solved by Dec. 31, there may be no turning this around.'”

“The scale of the crisis is viewed as existential: 22,000 units that house 48,000 vulnerable residents are at risk of foreclosure today, according to DHCD. ‘I think NDC is the canary in the coal mine,’ Brian Gordon, the senior vice president of government affairs for the Apartment and Office Building Association, told Bisnow. ‘We are hearing from other companies — these are larger, well-capitalized, conservatively financed companies — that are finding themselves in this very same precarious position. Frankly, we’re starting to smell the desperation that they could be facing a very similar fate.'”

“There are plenty of ‘for sale’ signs in front of Kelowna homes these days. ‘We have accumulated a lot of inventory over the last few months,’ said Kelowna realtor Jaime Briggs. ‘Right now, we are sitting at about nine months of listing inventory.’ According to Re/Max Canada, the new restrictions on short-term rentals that went into effect in May are contributing to the buyer’s market with many properties, especially condos, once used as vacation rentals now listed for sale, flooding the market. ‘People that owned those products and that they were renting are having to sell because they don’t want to go into long-term rental conditions,’ Briggs said.”

“Anthony Ingarra has one simple question: Where’s the $7 million he and other trusting real estate clients gave the law firm of a glamourous Toronto couple who have since had their licenses temporarily suspended for allegations of fraud? ‘We’re dealing with two people I’ve known close to 10 years. I’ve given them hundreds of referrals. We didn’t see this coming,’ says Ingarra, who is suing to recoup more than $400,000 on behalf of himself, his brother and elderly mother. ‘Singa was my lawyer, she was my go-to. It’s the ultimate betrayal.'”

“When Alice Hunt, 35, collected the keys to her first home in December 2019, she never imagined it would almost collapse five years later. The two-bed house on a new build estate in Waterlooville on the outskirts of Portsmouth had cracks in the walls, but developer Linden said they were just a result of the house settling, and quite literally painted over them. Four years later, it is obvious just how wrong that diagnosis was. She has taken on a second job in order to cover the additional costs, but now fears the issues with the property will take £75,000 off the value of her home. ‘I am living daily in fear that the house will collapse or brick work give way further and hurt myself or my dog,’ she said.”

“An Auckland property that sold for $300,000 less than the owner paid for it two years ago might have made the news this week – but it is far from the biggest loss sustained by a seller this year. The Māngere East property sold at mortgagee sale for $490,000 but last changed hands for $750,000 in March 2022. Nick Goodall, the head of research at property value firm CoreLogic, said the biggest loss recorded so far this year was for a Remuera apartment, which sold for $1 million less than it had previously been bought for. It was sold for $5.5m on 12 April, after being bought for $6.5m in March 2018. Goodall said it was a higher-end apartment. ‘There’s limited demand or limited market that can buy those types of property – it’s one of those ones where it’s been bought with the intention of holding it long-term and living in it but then circumstances change and the market wasn’t there when they had to try to sell it.'”

“The next largest loss was a house on Ngaio Street, Ōrākei, which lost $760,000. It was sold for $1.95m after being bought just over three years earlier for $2.71m. A Hill Road, Palm Beach house was third, losing $660,000 when it sold for $1.24m after being bought for $1.9m just over two years ago. Goodall said the majority of the losses in the top five – which also included a Ventnor Street, Seatoun property and one in Dornoch Place, Papakōwhai, were properties bought at the peak of the market in late 2021 or early 2022. ‘The market was booming at that time, there might have been some slightly irrational prices being paid… people overpaid slightly and then had difficulty as interest rates increased and made life tough.'”

“Home prices are expected to become cheaper over the coming years in many of Australia’s high-rise precincts and emerging apartment development zones. Most of the markets where prices were on track to fall over the next five years were in Sydney and Melbourne, but there was also a pocket of inner Brisbane likely to be affected. Many of these areas had a high supply of apartments available for sale, while declining rental yields were turning off investors. ‘People are running down their savings and there are now early signs of distress in much of the market,’ Digital Finance Analytics director Martin North said. ‘There is building evidence that people are getting into difficulty and more property investors will be selling because they can’t make their investments work.’ Prices for dwellings in inner Sydney suburb Haymarket – nearly all of which are units – fell an average of 22 per cent since 2019 to hit a median of $925,000 this year.”

“Bangladesh’s banking sector is currently facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions marked by an alarming surge in default loans. This staggering increase in non-performing loans (NPLs) reflects a growing vulnerability within the country’s financial system with NPLs now constituting 12.56 per cent of all disbursed loans. Economist Birupaksha Paul highlighted the role of defaulter-friendly policies in exacerbating the crisis in a piece for The Daily Star. These policies, which include a lending rate cap that disproportionately favours the wealthy, have created an environment where defaulters are often shielded from accountability. The result is a banking culture that is increasingly tolerant of defaulting borrowers, further weakening the financial system and undermining the principles of responsible lending. This environment has emboldened defaulters leading to a vicious cycle where bad loans beget more bad loans, eroding the overall health of the banking sector.”