These Days, Many Of Those Pandemic-Era Investors Are Dining On A Large Dish Of Reality

A report from WAVY. “For 11 years, Maureen and Peter Adams have lived in a house on Washington Street in Portsmouth, and in December, they decided to sell, but three months later, their house is still on the market. In the past four months, his agent has held three open houses, advertised in magazines and is putting the word out on social media. There have been interested buyers, but still no sale. But they’re being patient amid a slowing market. ‘I mean, we understand that it takes time to sell,’ he said. But is now the right time to sell? According to the February 2025 Virginia Realtors’ Virginia Home Sales Report, now may not be the best time to sell, as it has noted a 9% drop in sales from last February.”

KUSA TV in Colorado. “Residents of the First Creek Farm condominiums in Green Valley Ranch are grappling with large and unexpected fees nearly a year after a severe hailstorm struck the neighborhood on May 30, 2024. Homeowners are now being hit with substantial special assessment fees, some over $8,000, to cover what a property management group said is millions of dollars in property damage. Jacob Lively, a resident of the complex, hoped to sell his unit. He said he was shocked to receive a special assessment bill for $8,341 to help cover approximately $4 million in hail and wind damage. According to Accord Property Management, which manages the property, the fees are necessary to cover the insurance deductible. ‘I don’t see how they can charge that much. It’s outrageous,’ Lively said. ‘Not everybody just has that amount of money just to throw away. There’s no charge for $8,000 that should randomly pop up for anybody,’ Lively said, echoing the sentiments of other community members who spoke to 9NEWS. ‘They’re just trying to get money out of people, is what it seems like to me,’ Lively added.”

Market Place. “Builders are reacting to a potential dip in demand by offering more deals. The most recent sentiment read by the National Association of Home Builders noted that a growing share of builders were cutting prices to boost sales — 29% in March, compared with 26% in February. One of the biggest home builders in the U.S., Lennar recently said incentives to sell homes were running more than double what the company considered to be normal, with buyers seemingly worried about job security. In Florida’s Sarasota and Manatee counties, Lennar was offering buyers a price reduction on new homes of up to $45,000, and a credit of up to $14,000 at closing. In another city in Florida, the builder cut the price of a new home by over $100,000 to encourage buyers. Another builder, KB Home has been deploying a similar tactic.”

From Agence France-Presse. “Andre Laurent, a retired civil servant, spent half of each of the past 22 years in Florida to escape Canada’s frigid winters. But he says everything has changed and become ‘unpleasant’ since the return of Trump to the Oval Office in January. And so, he decided to sell his Florida home. ‘I no longer felt welcomed and I even felt like I was betraying my country,’ he said. Five of the six Canadians who lived in his Florida gated community also decided to leave the United States permanently. A recent drop in the value of the Canadian dollar also made US travel less affordable. For Cote, however, it’s about standing up for Canada: ‘We must spend money at home rather than with our neighbors who play dirty tricks on us.'”

The Daily News in Texas. “An internet news organization last week ran a story about Galveston. The headline was: ‘A coastal city where every house is for sale.’ That story sprang from — and dramatically distorted — news reporting in this newspaper. The notion that every house on the island is for sale is hyperbole, of course. But the oversupply of houses on the market is real. Galveston’s housing glut rises from a one-time surge in investments in short-term rental properties that came out of the five years since 2020 — in other words, the period of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was a classic example of irrational exuberance. Short-term rental registrations in Galveston spiked, rising from 2,300 in 2021 to a peak of about 4,900 in 2023.”

“These days, many of those pandemic-era investors are dining on a large dish of reality. The hopes for easy wealth were elusive. Managing rental property is a real, full-time job. Today, many owners are selling, and that has created the glut — something like an 18-month supply of homes for sale versus a normal market of roughly six months. The oversupply in the 77554 ZIP code, the island’s West End, is about 20 months. The current instability in the housing market proves a painful adage: If an investment opportunity sounds just too good to be true, it probably is.”

The Oregonian. “Out-of-state owners of Hood River vacation rental homes are challenging city ordinances that require a local resident to lease the home for at least a year before short-term rentals can occur. Lawyers for the owners from California, Washington, Alaska and British Columbia argue the law is discriminatory, reserving the rental market for ‘locals’ in violation of the U.S. Constitution. ‘Every out-of-state owner has been put out of business,’ attorney Heather A. Brann told U.S. District Judge Adrienne Nelson during oral arguments in the case last week. Ruston and Sheri Panabaker of Bellevue, Washington, bought their four-bedroom home in Hood River for about $525,000 in 2011 and began to rent it out a year later. They have rented it out for $500 a night for stays of at least four nights.”

“‘I have rented my house to many people who have spent a lot of money in the city,’ he said. ‘My house isn’t affordable housing.’ Now that he and his wife are retired, they plan to spend more time at the home but still will not meet the city’s requirements. When they’re not there, he said, ‘It’s just going to sit empty. My wife and I really cherish the town,’ he said, so it’s strange to suddenly feel vilified.”

CBS Los Angeles in California. “It’s a frustration we are hearing from thousands of insured homeowners that their insurance companies are not only being stingy with what they are rightfully owed, but also just the runaround to even get any support after surviving these intense wildfires. ‘Having saved the house with my bare hands, we might lose it anyways because what they are offering to repair it is so low,’ said Joel Pollak, a Pacific Palisades homeowner. Since January’s wildfires, they have had to continue to fight, but instead with their insurance company, which the couple said they pay for maximum coverage. ‘This is what you would do if your goal was to delay the process as much as possible and minimize your losses as an insurance company,’ Julia said.”

“‘They have been playing this game of musical adjusters in our opinion to buy time and to put pressure on the claimants because people are desperate for cash and some people will accept a low-ball offer,’ Joel said. The Pollak’s policy covers $1 million for contents replacement and $1.3 million for structure replacement. Through an outside adjuster the Pollaks personally hired, they found it would cost roughly $650,000 for repairs and $700,000 to replace the home’s contents. State Farm is estimating around $63,000 with no repairs to their rear wall, which, as Joel showed CBS News Los Angeles, has obvious damage from the fire. ‘They are basically failing in their duties under the policy and at no stage have they been good partners in this,’ Joel said.”

The Star Tribune. “Brooklyn Park will forgive a $3.8 million loan allowing for the long-struggling apartment complex Huntington Place to be sold with affordable housing restrictions intact. The decision spares Minnesota’s second largest apartment complex from possible foreclosure, which would have put housing for 2,500 low-income residents at risk. But tenants remain worried about potential displacement under new ownership. Council Member Christian Eriksen said it was the best choice out of a ‘slurry of terrible options.’ If the complex were sold at auction, affordable housing covenants would likely disappear, and it is uncertain who would buy the aging property with millions in deferred maintenance. The nonprofit, said Eric Anthony Johnson, chief executive of Aeon, also worked to ‘move lenders to walk away from millions of dollars’ to get the deal through. The National Equity Fund is expected to lose $50 million in the sale.”

The Timmins Daily Press in Canada. “Former tenants in Timmins of the now defunct real estate empire SID Developments should know their rights, an expert on tenant law advises. Those seeking compensation for living in poor conditions can do so from the new landlord, BIG North Capital. Under Section 2 of the Residential Tenancies Act, ‘landlord’ includes successors in title. There are still open lawsuits against SID Developments, which was run by former child actor Robby Clarke and his group of executives. Clarke and his associates allegedly spent investment capital on luxury goods and trips, rather than investing in their portfolio of rental real estate across northern Ontario.”

“BIG North Capital is a syndicated investment firm made up of 177 former SID Developments investors who regrouped to make good on their investments. They have kept 185 properties in northern Ontario, including 75 properties in Timmins. Their stated intention is to keep and maintain the properties as rental housing. Spokesperson Rob Morell said in a March 25 email that renovations to their Timmins properties are progressing well. ‘We have also decided to list about 20 properties in order to assist with operating and renovating costs so you will see those come into the market soon (mostly Kirkland Lake and Sudbury).'”

From Domain News. “Australia’s best-performing suburbs leapt by $500,000 in 12 months, while others dropped by $289,000, according to Domain data. The suburb where prices fell the hardest in the same period was Chadstone in Melbourne’s outer-east, where the median unit price dropped 33.3 per cent from $757,121 to $505,000, taking a $252,121 hit. The variation between property type growth rates in the same period was likely due to an oversupply of mid- to high-rise apartments being sold, says agent Tai Menahem of Buxton Ashburton.”

“‘It’s just supply outweighing demand,’ he says. ‘With investors getting out of the market and more of them putting [apartments] on the market for sale, buyers have heaps of options and not feeling any pressure to go and put big tickets on an apartment, for example, when you’ve got six of the same in the same block.'”

MIT Technology Review. “A year or so ago, Xiao Li was seeing floods of Nvidia chip deals on WeChat. A real estate contractor turned data center project manager, he had pivoted to AI infrastructure in 2023, drawn by the promise of China’s AI craze. Now, his WeChat feed and industry group chats tell a different story. Traders are more discreet in their dealings, and prices have come back down to earth. Meanwhile, two data center projects Li is familiar with are struggling to secure further funding from investors who anticipate poor returns, forcing project leads to sell off surplus GPUs. ‘It seems like everyone is selling, but few are buying,’ he says.”

“The local Chinese outlets Jiazi Guangnian and 36Kr report that up to 80% of China’s newly built computing resources remain unused. The upshot is that projects are failing, energy is being wasted, and data centers have become ‘distressed assets’ whose investors are keen to unload them at below-market rates. The situation may eventually prompt government intervention says Jimmy Goodrich, senior advisor for technology at the RAND Corporation: ‘The Chinese government is likely to step in, take over, and hand them off to more capable operators.'”

“With China’s real estate sector—once the backbone of local economies—slumping for the first time in decades, officials scrambled to find alternative growth drivers. In the meantime, the country’s once high-flying internet industry was also entering a period of stagnation. In this vacuum, AI infrastructure became the new stimulus of choice. ‘AI felt like a shot of adrenaline,’ says Li. ‘A lot of money that used to flow into real estate is now going into AI data centers.’ However, not all brokers were looking to make money from data centers in the first place. Instead, many were interested in gaming government benefits all along. Some operators exploit the sector for subsidized green electricity, obtaining permits to generate and sell power, according to Fang Cunbao, a data center project manager based in Beijing and some Chinese media reports.”