The Spring Housing Market Is Dead On Arrival

A report from Alabama.com. “Are federal job cuts to blame for a sudden cool-down in the Huntsville housing market? Some realtors and real estate analysts believe that may have been the case in February. ‘While Huntsville is dynamic and growing with significant job opportunities for professionals, recent federal job cuts in key sectors like defense, technology, and research, along with rising interest rates, have raised concerns about a potential slowdown in the housing market,’ said William Cary Hulsey Fellow at the University of Alabama’s College of Business. And realtor Matt Curtis said February’s numbers signaled a ‘shift in momentum.’ He said there were ‘plenty of price drops out there and eager to move on sellers are bringing a surge of buyers to the market.'”

From WPEC. “Snowbirds are flying elsewhere! According to South Florida real estate agent Catherine Spino, some Canadians are flocking out of Florida. She notes there are three main reasons for this shift in the market: the U.S. to Canadian dollar exchange rate, the new condo assessments, and the cost of insuring your property. Most of the snowbirds Spino is working with are looking to sell their condos, which are second homes for her clients. Spino, a Canadian American, tells CBS12 News says some families just can’t keep up with the rising cost of HOA fees which have increased to keep up with the rising cost to insure condo buildings. She also says some families can’t afford to come up with large amounts of money, on such short notice, to pay for the new 40-year condo assessments and any fixes that those assessments uncover. So, some families are taking a cut on their investment just to sell it off.”

“‘If they don’t even have the money to pay the $20,000 to $25,000 assessment, they put it for sale on the market, and in the contract, the buyer is going to be liable for his assessment at closing,’ Spino tells CBS12 News. ‘So they are selling it for a bit less.’ Spino tells CBS12 News the exchange rate is also a big factor for Canadians who want their money to go further. As of mid-March, $1 U.S. dollar is equivalent to 70 cents in Canada.”

KJZZ in Arizona. “Residents of cold-weather places have made the Valley their winter home for years. These so-called ‘snowbirds’ tend to come from places like Minnesota, Illinois or the Dakotas. There are also a lot of snowbirds from Canada, but as Laurie Lavine, a dual American-Canadian citizen and Valley realtor, explains, that number is dropping a bit. Lavine says part of that is due to the currency exchange — the Canadian dollar is weaker than the American one. And higher interest rates also play a role, he says. But Lavine says there’s something else going on. He says working with Canadian buyers and sellers accounts for about three-quarters of his business. Lavine joined The Show to discuss, before the reporting on the registration requirement, if he’s seeing Canadian homeowners in the Valley trying to get out of this market and sell their homes.”

“‘I shouldn’t say all of them, but definitely the overwhelming majority of them. So out of the 10 listings that I have right now with Canadians, seven out of 10 of those are leaving for the reasons that we’ve just been discussing, you know, fatigue from the currency exchange. But the way that they’re feeling bullied is the last straw that broke the camel’s back. So with the current, you know, political climate just being, you know, enough to say, OK, that’s it, we’re doing it, we’re going to sell. And some of them are saying, well, we might come back, but for now we’re just, you know, not not sure of what’s going to happen. The properties that they, that they put on the market, you know, they’re, they’re selling, you know, fairly quickly if they’re priced appropriately because, you know, they’re, they’re not living in the, you know, 12 months of the year.'”

“‘So how big of a topic of conversation is this among Canadians? Both, I guess here in the Valley and elsewhere, in terms of should we stay or should we go? LEVINE: ‘It’s very commonplace. And actually we’ve been trying to talk out some of our talk, you know, to convince some of our friends that are purchased down here that are thinking of selling. We’re trying to talk them out of it.'”

WATE in Tennessee. “The community where Gary Mooneyham’s home once stood is off of State Highway 353, about 18 miles east of Greeneville. When he would step on his porch for coffee, he had a spectacular view of the mountains. The view is still there, but his house is not, and he can’t get any help to replace it. Mooneyham bought his two-bedroom place in April 2017 using a home loan from the VA. The home was elevated. Today, his homeowner’s insurance company won’t cover the loss. Farm Bureau wrote, ‘Water damage is excluded.’ FEMA cut Mooneyham a check for $46,000, which he used to buy a small camper trailer. However, he was hoping for more from the government.”

“‘I was asking for help on my mortgage and everything because I still owe $85,000 on this patch of dirt right here,’ said Mooneyham. Freedom Mortgage has been after him since he stopped his monthly payments. ‘They want their mortgage payments. They will want their money, but I’m not giving it to them because I ain’t got nothing to give for,’ said Mooneyham. Over the weekend, Mooneyham received a notice from his homeowners insurance company, that his yearly premium of $1,300 is due. He couldn’t believe they sent it to him. He’s hoping FEMA’s ‘Financial Housing Assistance Program’ will come through. The program helps qualified homeowners replace a primary residence that is destroyed. He’s behind more than $3,200 in his mortgage and does not plan to make it up. ‘I told them you come up here and build my house or help me get it back, I’ll start paying the mortgage again or go to foreclosure,’ said Mooneyham. Mooneyham told us, he’s not the kind of guy that likes handouts, but in this case, he just wants a ‘fair deal.'”

The Indiana Lawyer. “From a modest duplex on the near-east side to a recently constructed modern home in Fountain Square to a condo near Eagle Creek Park, more than 200 residential properties around Indianapolis have one thing in common: All are connected to at least one of the more than two dozen active lawsuits that investors, lenders and contractors have filed against brothers Jeremy and Joshua Tucker. The complaints, all of them real estate-related, come from local and out-of-state plaintiffs who allege they lost money—in the case of one Florida investor, more than $7 million—when the defendants defaulted on loan payments, failed to pay invoices for home repairs or committed outright fraud. Some of the litigation involves lenders seeking foreclosure.”

“Indianapolis resident D. Michael Harding’s complaint alleges a conspiracy in which the defendants used several ‘nefarious mechanisms to siphon money from Harding and conceal their fraudulent activity.’ One example: The defendants engaged in a series of property transfers between them to artificially inflate the homes’ values, Harding alleges, ‘enabling them to obtain financing from investors like Harding at prices far above market value.’ In his complaint, Harding alleges he has extended more than $3 million in loans to the defendants since 2023, with the intent of making money on home-flipping projects. Harding said all of those loans have gone into default. Harding also alleges that even though he was supposed to have a first-mortgage position on the homes purchased with these loans, several of the homes have been transferred to new owners without satisfying Harding’s loans on these properties.”

“Indianapolis attorney James Knauer, who is representing the Perrinas, said he would characterize Jeremy Tucker’s activities as that of a Ponzi scheme. ‘It’s clear in complaint after complaint after complaint, people were induced to invest in homes with the idea that he would rehab the homes, and then he took the money and didn’t rehab them, and that money was either used to acquire other properties and bring in other investors or, to pay people who he already owed money to and couldn’t pay,’ Knauer said.”

ABC 10 News in California. “One resident is still feeling stuck after a decades-long on-site security resident program with the South Bay Union School District ended in June of last year. Pete Salisbury is a resident for Oneata Elementary School and currently lives next to the school, a fence bordering his home with the school on one side and the playground on the other. ‘Going through a lot of grief,’ said Salisbury. ‘When you have a place that you really care about and the students and parents and the teachers of this school, they really appreciate me, they care about me very much.’ The South Bay Union School District’s security program was created in the 1970’s to provide security to the schools. Residents would own their homes but not their land, exchanging living on campus for security services.”

“‘Losing my house is one of my biggest purchases of my life,’ said Salisbury. ‘I used a lot of my retirement savings and it’s mine but in the process of me having to leave, the school district is going to just bulldoze it down because it’s too old to move. So losing that is really hard.’ However, in a statement to ABC 10News, the Board of Trustees for the district ended the program because they identified it as a significant uninsured liability risk, obsolete due to current security technology, and limited the potential open site access between classrooms and outdoor play space.The district said he’s required to leave his property by April 5th.”

The Oregonian. “The company buying Portland vacation rental management firm Vacasa said Monday it will pay 6% more to acquire the business, upping the size of the deal after another bidder emerged. That raises the size of the transaction to about $120 million. Vacasa manages vacation rental homes across the country and lists them on its website, taking a cut of the fees that renters pay. The business has been faltering for years, with sales falling and losses mounting as the company struggled to efficiently manage far-flung properties. All the offers represent a dramatic comedown for Vacasa, which had a $4 billion market value when it began trading on the Nasdaq exchange in 2021.”

From Global News. “Spring is typically the time of year when activity in Canada’s housing market heats up, but this year’s spring housing market appears to be dampened by the threat of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs. By the end of February, nearly five months’ worth of housing inventory had accumulated in Canada. ‘The spring housing market is dead on arrival,’ Clay Jarvis, mortgage expert at NedWallet Canada, told Global News. ‘That’s just for February. In March, we’re going to have the same uncertainty hanging over the market. On April 2, we might have another round of tariffs coming along.’ Jarvis added that fears of a recession and mass layoffs have spooked new buyers. ‘When you can’t plan for the next six months, it’s really hard to take on a 25-year mortgage,’ he said.”

“This does not, however, mean there isn’t demand for home ownership, he said. ‘People want to buy homes. It’s Canada. People see homes as a major investment. They see it as their retirement. People want homes. They just don’t want to be shackled by a mortgage at a time when they don’t know if they’re going to have a job three to six months from now.’ Rishard Rameez, CEO of Toronto-based realty group Zown said anyone looking to upsize to a bigger home could also find some luck in the market. ‘If a seller is looking to upsize, that’s their motivation to sell their property, they might be better off taking that loss on the initial purchase,’ he said. He said this is because even though they might take some losses on their property, they might get a fairly good deal on a bigger property.”

From News.com.au. “A panellist on last week’s QandA has revealed what she would have said to Aussie dad Morgan Cox, who drew a standing ovation for his heartbreaking plea for the government to cut immigration before ‘every regular working Australian is homeless.’ He recounted going to inspections to try to find cheaper places, only to be outnumbered by ‘dozens of people lined up”, many of them immigrants ‘and they have plenty more money than I can possibly get. My family has already been forced out of Sydney for the same reasons. I want to know is the government going to cut immigration to match housing availability or are we just going to keep going until every regular working Australian is homeless?'”

“Asked by QandA host Patricia Karvelas whether there ‘other things you’re looking for’ beyond lowering immigration, Mr Cox said ‘that’s really the main one.’ ‘And as I understand it the government makes the laws and decides who comes in, so if you’ve got 2.5 million people coming in in a few years, surely you can say to them, ‘No, we don’t have enough houses for you,’ he said, drawing more applause from the audience.”

Radio New Zealand. “So where did the global economic system go so wrong? Dr Cahal Moran is behavioural economist and a fellow at the London School of Economics, and told Nine to Noon why he believes the world finds itself in its current state – an economic turmoil that seems to never go away. ‘For a long time, the economy has been structured in a way that, there’s average growth, there’s GDP growth, there’s some technological developments,’ he said. ‘But a lot of the things that people really care about that really signify economic stability and security, from housing to good jobs to health and education, we’ve kind of neglected those areas. I think that we’re seeing that unfold, and we’ve seen a lot of political backlash to that as well.'”

“So, why are we poorer? Costs of services that used to be provided by the state have crept up, which Moran said have been particularly noticeable in the United Kingdom. ‘The thing is that a lot even a lot of these things that are still provided by the state, the services kind of started to deteriorate a bit,’ he said. ‘This is very true in my home country of the UK. We’ve had austerity for such a long time and student fees, they were introduced 20 years ago or so and they went up.’ Moran said a report released by Bennett Institute in Cambridge found that facilities across the UK are disappearing, such as doctors, pharmacies and local community centres. Despite that, fees and prices are still increasing, while general services continues to deteriorate, he said. ‘They tripled just after I went to university…there’s been more and more fees introduced into public services and services that matter to people, but also, they’ve just been cut down.'”

“Moran’s introduction to economics was as a high school student in 2007 as the world was devastated by a global recession. He said while unfortunate, it helped shaped his idea of economics. ‘It was the biggest recession in 70 years at the time, and it wiped a lot of people out, and it threatened people across the globe and at one point, it really seemed like the cash machines were going to stop spitting out money,’ he said. ‘That’s what people thought before there was this sort of massive rescue package. But then we had, in my opinion, completely the wrong response to the financial crisis, completely the wrong response with austerity. We failed to address the issues that had been, exposed by the financial crisis. I think our economies across the world had been quite reliant on the financial sector. They’ve been quite reliant on the housing bubble and the credit that came with it, and credit cards were propping up consumer spending. I think we could have responded to it much, much better, and we probably could have fixed, ameliorated a lot of the problems that have festered until today and have only got worse.'”

“Those problems include globalisation, he said. Moran said while it was a separate issue, it was part of the same ideology, such as free markets and free trade, which would work in the financial sector. ‘Globalisation meant moving a lot of a lot of industry to poorer countries, as we know, China being usually the canonical example, but also a lot of other countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam and we exported things like clothes production and toy production.’ What that meant really was that a lot of the manufacturing hubs and the industry that held a lot of towns and communities together, in countries like the US and UK, but really across the world…even in Brazil, this was this was true. So, it’s not just a rich world thing.'”

“‘A lot of these industries kind of suffered…it’s not like I want to reverse the growth in China, that’s not what I’m saying. But again, we just didn’t do enough to ameliorate it. I think between the financial crisis and then the response to it of austerity with deteriorating public services and lacklustre growth, and also this issue of these communities that have been left behind for a very long time under the guise that a rising tide lifts all boats, free trade is going to work, we just got a lot of political discontent.'”