There Are A Number Of Areas Where The Current Supply Isn’t Being Absorbed By The Current Market

A weekend topic starting with WINK News in Florida. “Beattie Development Corporation, a Cape Coral-based company, is under scrutiny for taking money from customers without completing the promised work. According to court records, Larry Hyman, an attorney, filed to close the company’s liquidation case and included the payout numbers. Some homeowners affected by Beattie Development Corporation’s unfinished projects learned they would receive $240 each. Mary Ann and John Fitzgerald, also former customers, expressed their frustration. ‘This is a slap in the face,’ Mary Ann said. ‘The guy took us for almost 400 grand, and it’s like, okay, we’ll take you out for dinner and a beer, and we’re good,’ John said. ‘It makes us feel like we’re idiots,’ said Mary Ann.”

Treasure Coast Newspapers. “On Feb. 28, TCPalm journalist Jack Randall posted a story about a survey that found home prices in the Sebastian-Vero Beach area took one of the steepest price drops in the nation last year. ResiClub’s analysis found a 3.2% drop in the community’s home prices. Of the 10 communities with the greatest percentage decreases, 8 are in Florida. I think there’s a common assumption that home prices on the Treasure Coast — and elsewhere in Florida — will continue to climb forever because the Sunshine State is such a popular place to live. For years, government officials have told us we needed more development because it produces more tax revenues. If you’re looking for proof that growth doesn’t ‘pay for itself,’ consider this: We shouldn’t need to keep building if the tax revenues generated by past development are enough to pay for already-needed services. Instead, we’ve got a giant Ponzi scheme perpetuated by our state and local governments.”

From Global News. “Over the last 15 years, grain farmer Dale McMullen has escaped the Alberta cold for sunny Arizona. But after this winter, he doesn’t plan on returning. ‘The papers are signed,’ said the Innisfail, Alta., resident. ‘I don’t want to spend another one of my dollars down there.’ He and his wife sold their winter home in Phoenix. It closed this Friday. The McMullens are part of a real estate exodus. Nathalie Mancuso, who lives just outside Montreal, recently sold her condo in Pompano Beach, north of Fort Lauderdale. ‘We didn’t want to keep investing and giving our money to a country that is led by a fool,’ she told Global News. ‘[Trump] was insulting Canadians like they’re a piece of carpet under your feet.’ McMullen said he made up his mind after Trump threatened Canadian sovereignty and called former prime minister Justin Trudeau ‘governor.’ ‘Enough is enough. We don’t want to support that anymore. We came home and we’ll join in and get our elbows up.'”

“Catherine Spino, a real estate agent in south Florida, is witnessing what she describes as a ‘major shift,’ as the market becomes more expensive and less predictable for Canadians. ‘There are multiple reasons,’ she told Global News. ‘But definitely they want to sell, and they want to cash out and bring back their money to Canada.’ ‘When they say that they’re going to invade or they’re gonna crush our economy, you have to wonder,’ said retiree Bob Gass. The Manitoban has been a snowbird for the last 15 years and owns a home with his wife in south-central Florida. Gass says several Canadians have put up ‘for sale’ signs in the neighbourhood. ‘If you’re Canadian, you’re either putting your house up for sale and leaving or you’re talking about it. And that’s where my wife and I are now,’ he said. On Friday, new rules went into effect, requiring visitors staying in the United States for more than 30 days to register with the U.S. government. ‘We’d like to comply, but if that becomes a problem, then we’ve got to sell our house and get out,’ said Gass.”

The Washington Post. “Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist with Bright MLS, put it this way: ‘The factors affecting the D.C. region right now are very dynamic. The landscape for the D.C. housing market turned in February overall. It’s going to be a pretty uncertain spring housing market.’ ‘Inventory kind of stabilized,’ last year, said Samantha Damato, president of the Greater Capital Area Association of Realtors. ‘It wasn’t as low, but also buyers are being a little bit more cautious. And price mattered, so instead of kind of a seller being able to just state a price, it really needed to be in line with the market.'”

“But condo buyers beware: prices fell in many areas, especially in the District. For example, the median price fell 10.5 percent in the Anacostia/Hillcrest Zip 20020, 8.2 percent in Congress Heights Zip 20032 and 8.6 percent in 16th Street Heights/Crestwood, Zip 20011. To the north, sprawling between Potomac and downtown Bethesda, Zip 20817 saw nearly 60 percent drop in condo prices, from $872,000 to $369,000 and the number sold fell from 161 to 100. ‘Your mom in another state or your cousin may not be the best information for some of these things. In real estate, your heart heals faster than your wallet, so make sure you know your wallet,’ Damato said.”

From KFMB. “Over the course of 25 years, the median cost for a single-family home in San Diego County has increased by more than $785,000, according to Zillow. The data shows that in 2000, the median cost for a San Diego County home was nearly $235,000. In February 2025, median home values skyrocketed to $1,020,394. In 2000, the average monthly median home price in San Diego was $234,832. By 2005, home values nearly doubled to $541,211 for that year. The housing market crash in 2007 brought the only declines in home values, with the median home dipping to $373,972 in 2012. Jack Caporal, the research director at Motley Fool’s personal finance branch, Motley Fool Money, said home prices in San Diego County won’t be dropping anytime soon. Caporal said median home values have risen across the country, but California remains at the top of the list for the highest home prices, just behind Hawaii. ‘Home values in California have been largely on the rise since 2020, much like the rest of the country,’ said Caporal.”

KGTV in California. “San Diego home buyers have noticed a cool down in the market. Adam Burch, who’s searching for a new home believes now is the best time to buy. ‘There’s a lot of homes hanging out on the market for longer than I’ve seen, they also seem to be selling for lower than the list price,’ Burch said. Lina Saba at Compass Real Estate confirmed this trend. She showed me an app the company uses to track housing trends. According to the app, almost half of sellers in the San Diego market lowered their pricing in the last month. ‘When inventory was super scarce we were having homes flying off the shelf,’ Saba said. ‘Now we don’t see that as much.’ Saba advises buyers who can afford the mortgage to buy now, and refinance their rates later, although she says it’s harder than ever to predict the market.”

The Center Square. “California’s economic, academic, media, and political establishment still embraces the notion of the state’s inevitable supremacy. ‘The future depends on us,’ Gov. Gavin Newsom said at his first inauguration, ‘and we will seize this moment.’ Critics say this vision is at odds with the facts on the ground. Rather than the exemplar of a new ‘progressive capitalism’ and a model for social justice, California both accommodates the highest number of billionaires and the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate. It has the third highest gap, behind just Washington, D.C., and Louisiana, between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state. Nearly one in five Californians – many working – lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) estimates another one-fifth live in near-poverty – roughly 15 million people in total.”

“The signs of failure are evident on the streets. Roughly half the nation’s homeless population lives in the Golden State, many concentrated in disease- and crime-ridden tent cities in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Barely one in three state residents – and only one in four younger voters – now considers California a good place to achieve the American dream. Increasingly, California is where this dream goes to die. In August, for example, the New York Times reported how its development into a one-party state controlled by progressive Democrats has made it the country’s center of political corruption. ‘Over the last 10 years,’ the Times reported, ‘576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois.'”

“In the late 1960s, the value of the typical California home was more than four times the average household’s income. Today, it’s worth more than 11 times. The median California home is priced nearly 2.5 times higher than the median national home, according to 2022 Census data. If you think of California’s wealth-creation machine as a conveyor belt, continually providing generations with a stake in society through their homes, that belt has now stalled. Ultimately California, the birthplace of youth culture, is getting old, in some places more resembling Hawaii than the entrepreneurial powerhouse of the past. From 2010 to 2018, California aged 50% more rapidly than the rest of the country, according to the American Community Survey. As of 2022, 21%, or 8.3 million people, were over the age of 60 in California, and according to the California Department of Aging, this population is expected to grow by 40% in the next 10 years. By 2036, seniors will be a larger share of the population than kids under the age of 18. California is gradually ditching the surfboard and adopting the walker.”

The San Francisco Chronicle. “When then-Mayor London Breed signed legislation in 2022 to spur construction of small apartment buildings in San Francisco, prominent YIMBY activists warned it would result in very few new homes. In a letter to the city at the time, SF YIMBY volunteer lead Robert Fruchtman and legal advocacy director Rafa Sonnenfeld told the city, ‘We do not expect this proposal will add much new housing.’ Three years later, it appears the two activists were right. No buildings have been built as a result of the legislation, which allows fourplexes in every neighborhood with up to six units permitted on all corner lots. The city has received only 11 applications under the law, most of which are dead, stalled or mired in the city’s approvals process. Just one project has received an approval letter, but it has yet to break ground because someone appealed it under the California Environmental Quality Act.”

“‘At current construction costs, rental rates and single-family prices, financial feasibility … to develop triplexes and fourplexes is challenging,’ a city-commissioned report on the legislation from 2022 said. ‘A project in a middle-income neighborhood would have a $1.3 million gap between construction costs and market value, while one in areas such as Pacific Heights would be short about $5 million, according to the report.’ Park North Real Estate broker Kevin Birmingham, who works frequently with developers, said high labor and material costs are keeping homeowners from redeveloping their properties. ‘To go into development in general right now is not happening for the most part,’ Birmingham said. ‘It’s very, very expensive, and when you combine that with a lack of lenders and costs going through the roof, it just doesn’t make sense.'”

The Sacramento Bee in California. “Under the current way of doing things, it could take the city of Sacramento 300 years to build enough affordable housing for all the homeless people, Mayor Kevin McCarty said Tuesday. McCarty, whose term began Dec. 10, asked Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency leaders to return to the council with options to build affordable housing for cheaper, and without the ‘bells and whistles.’ ‘We give a lottery ticket to 5% of the people and what about the other 95%?’ McCarty said during the council meeting. ‘We’re building a BMW solution for a small subset when we’re in a crisis. Maybe we need to be focusing on, you know, Toyotas, Honda civic versions.'”

“McCarty did his calculations by taking the roughly $600,000 cost per door to open the 52-unit Central Sacramento Studios Phase 2 downtown, for which the council approved loans during the same meeting. He took that figure and multiplied it by 4,000, to represent the estimated number of homeless people in the city of Sacramento, based on the most recent count, combined with the city’s shelter bed inventory. SHRA executive director La Shelle Dozier responded that a big part of the high cost is the cost it takes to pay contractors to provide services to residents of those units. ‘If you put people into housing with no services, it’s not going to be successful,’ Dozier said. In response, McCarty then ran the numbers just for construction alone. For Central Sacramento Studios, that number is nearly $400,000 per unit, according to a city staff report. That would still take 175 years, he said. Other jurisdictions around California are also asking the same questions to try to reduce costs to reduce affordable housing costs, McCarty said. Several affordable housing projects in the Bay Area cost over $1 million per unit to build, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2022.”

The Winnipeg Sun. “People across Canada are sounding the alarm: Housing is no longer affordable for many, especially young Canadians trying to buy their first home. You hear it from families in Winnipeg, business owners in Calgary, and parents in the Maritimes watching their kids give up on the dream of homeownership. In response, politicians are rushing to microphones with their latest promise: Eliminate the GST on new home purchases. They say this will make housing more affordable. It’s too little, too late. And frankly, it’s a distraction. Let’s be clear: If politicians really wanted to make housing more affordable, they would stop taxing it to death.”

“Consider the number of times you pay taxes on a single home. It’s not once, or twice. It’s at least four or five separate tax events, often more, that hit both the builder and the buyer. According to the Canadian Home Builders’ Association (CHBA), government-imposed costs can account for over 25% of the price of a new home in major urban centres. In Vancouver and Toronto, that number climbs even higher. In a 2022 CHBA study, government charges added more than $200,000 to the price of a new home in the Greater Toronto Area. That’s not market forces — that’s bureaucracy and taxation. It’s not complicated. You can’t inflate the cost of housing through layers of taxation and regulation, then claim to be solving the problem by shaving off one tax at the end of the process. That’s not leadership — it’s PR.”

“The average Canadian is smart enough to see through this. They know housing costs have exploded because of decisions made by all levels of government over the past two decades. They know wages aren’t keeping up, and they’re not buying the talking points anymore. Homebuilders are warning us. Realtors are warning us. Economists are warning us, but too many in government are refusing to listen. Either they don’t understand the system they’ve built, or they do — and they’re benefiting from it.”

The Herald Sun in Australia. “The future of the Allan government’s new activity centres is in doubt after experts have warned many are years away from their first new apartments being built. Development industry insiders have revealed there is a six-figure gulf between what homebuyers will pay for units in several of the designated zones, and the price needed for projects to stack up financially. Multiple areas are unlikely to see affordable homes built, with price estimates for apartments in five and six-storey complexes suggesting price tags of more than $1m. Charter Keck Cramer national research director Richard Temlett said that across Melbourne there was a $100,000-$300,000 gap between homebuyers’ budgets today, and what it would cost to build units in most of these areas.”

“‘Prices would have to be in the range from $875,000 to $1.05m to turn a profit at present,’ Mr Temlett said. ‘These are the mid-market, entry-level homes. But our research shows that the market would be willing to pay $775,000. These projects are very, very far from being financially viable.’ Marshall White Projects director Leonard Teplin has estimated likely sales prices for 10 of the 50 new activity centres, with figures as high as $30,000 a square metre in the Toorak village. With one-bedroom apartments unlikely to appeal in the well-off neighbourhood, Mr Teplin said in most instances they would have to be two-bedroom offerings — and likely to top $2m with a fairly typical 70sq m floorplan.”

“Mr Teplin made the estimates based on apartment projects already for sale in the areas, but warned somesuburbs already had more than a year’s worth of homes to be sold in them. ‘There are a number of areas where the current supply isn’t being absorbed by the current market,’ Mr Teplin said. ‘Brighton and Camberwell would take at least 12 months for the market to absorb the apartments that are currently available. And that could be Kew, as well. Some of these areas have half a dozen to a dozen projects in them already and buyers have plenty of choice, so bringing more buyers into these places will be more difficult – especially with the way costs are.'”