Oh, Yeah, Why Would Houses Not Always Go Up By 10 Percent A Year?

A report from WFLA in Florida. “It happens after every hurricane. Developers and speculators swoop in, offering to buy storm-damaged homes, but what happens to homeowners if the buyer backs out? It happened to some Redington Beach homeowners. They thought they sealed the deal to sell their properties, but months later, they learned the investor was backing out. According to the contract, the buyer, Jason Matthews with 16 Redington Development offered cash and no contingences. Toray Leonard said Matthews’ broker told her they needed to kill the deal, citing market conditions. She said some of the other homeowners were offered a new deal but for less money. ‘Some of the people he’s gone back to have taken a 70% decrease in the offer,’ Leonard said. Leonard said she feels Matthews should at least return the escrow money used to seal the now broken deal. ‘Jason Matthew 16 Redington development, he wouldn’t even release the escrow that he put as a deposit,’ Leonard said.”

The Palm Beach Post in Florida. “A blacklist of Palm Beach County condominiums ineligible for Fannie Mae-backed mortgages has more than tripled over the past two years, according to a Miami law firm specializing in condo law. South Florida’s three southeast counties top the list for the most blacklisted buildings with Miami-Dade ranked first at 344, followed by Broward’s 242 and Palm Beach County’s 110. In May 2023, just 35 Palm Beach County buildings were on the list. ‘When the factual information does not qualify the community because it hasn’t kept reserves and hasn’t done the work, they want the information to change overnight,’ said Michael Gelfand, a West Palm Beach attorney who specializes in real estate and association law, noting that another key question for lenders is how many units are owner-occupied. Gelfand said the new rules and current costs to comply with them will be a bump in the road for many unit owners, however, some people will undoubtedly be unable to pay for expensive repairs.”

KXAN in Texas. “Home sales in the Austin metropolitan area are down 10% so far in 2025 compared to the first few months of 2024, according to the Austin Board of Realtors. ‘Homeowners during COVID accrued home equity gains above that which we would have otherwise expected,’ said Clare Knapp, housing economist at ABOR. “We’re also seeing perhaps a little bit of reluctance among sellers to meaningfully reduce their home prices, and I think that has contributed to some extent to that sluggishness in sales. It’s a very different market for buyers than it was even a few years ago during the pandemic, when buyers really didn’t have many options available to them, and we were just watching homes fly off the shelves,’ she continued. Even though prices are declining, Knapp said more needs to happen. While the median sales of a home in the metropolitan statistical area dropped 12% from 2022 to 2024, that value was 40% higher in 2024 than it was in 2019.”

The Arizona Republic. “Home sales were up by more than 1,000 to 6,790 in March, according to the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service. Homeowners listed 11,163 houses in March, more than any month in several years. Total Valley home listings climbed to 24,709 in March, the highest overall inventory of listings in several years. ‘We are in a buyers’ market because of rising supply,’ said Tina Tamboer, a senior housing analyst with The Cromford Report. ‘For sellers, that means concessions, concessions, concessions.'”

Westword in Colorado. “According to the a recent market trends report from the Denver Metro Association of Realtors Market, the median sale price in metro Denver rose 38.5 percent from March 2020 to April 2022, to $616,500. By March of this year, the median sale price had dropped to $599,000 indicating Denver’s residential real estate is not as hot as it once was. In fact, Denver had one of the highest jumps in inventory nationwide between February and March 2025 and is the thirteenth most friendly market to buyers right now, according to DMAR, while Colorado Springs ranks fifth and Boulder ranks tenth.”

“According to Andrew Abrams, a Guide Real Estate broker and DMAR market trends committee member, the large uptick in inventory this March is a return to normal. ‘Everyone has a relatively short memory, so as things had sped up and we had historically low inventory. That felt normal, and it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, why would houses not always go up by 10 percent a year?’ Abrams says. ‘Right now, when we’re seeing more properties on the market, — I’ve heard from not just clients, but people who are seeing a lot of signs out there or seeing them last a lot longer — that adjustment feels new, but it’s actually much more historically normal than what we had seen during those three years of really intense appreciation.’ Abrams says buyers should also not compromise too much on inspection items. ‘That’s where buyers in this market can really make sure that they’re getting what they need to feel comfortable moving in on day one, where, in the past, sellers would say, ‘Well, we have three other buyers lined up,’ he says.”

Axios on California. “Before Peter Navarro designed trade wars for President Trump, he orchestrated housing wars in San Diego across five unsuccessful bids for local office. Navarro, then a UC Irvine economics professor, led San Diego’s slow-growth movement in the 1990s, drawing battle lines that still define today’s development fights. He called for a moratorium on housing until the city could provide adequate services, increased fees on new development, and tied housing permits to new police hires. That campaign also proposed limiting immigration into the city to control population growth and ease the strain on housing.”

“Bill Fulton, the former head of San Diego planning who chronicled southern California urban growth politics in ‘Reluctant Metropolis,’ wrote that Navarro would have been a seminal figure in regional urban planning history if he had won that mayoral race. That era of slow-growthers, Fulton wrote, shared Trump’s view of trade: ‘More development creates losers as well as winners, so you’d better box out the bad development or at least make those developers pay through the nose.'”

“In his political tell-all for the San Diego Reader, Navarro argued that developers, without the tight planning controls he championed, ‘will leave air pollution, overcrowded schools, underpoliced streets, sewer systems bursting at their seams, and traffic jams that can (and often do in California) make grown men cry.’ One prescription was for developers to pay for all libraries, parks, roads, sewage systems, etc. ‘at the same time as the houses — not five years later (or never) like most of these punks in pinstripes prefer.'”

The Center Square. “With Illinois now being home to the ninth highest home foreclosure rates in the country, Republican state Sen. Martin McLaughlin traces the state’s growing housing struggles back to the doorsteps of the capitol in Springfield. McLaughlin argues there’s a good reason why Democrats in Springfield are slow to address the issue. ‘Growing moving companies and U-Hauls by people moving out of Illinois is also another category that we’re leading in and one that’s not positive for the future of Illinois families. They’re not acknowledging the situation because if they do, they have to own it,’ he said. ‘If they acknowledge what their policies have done, they have to own it and right now Gov. Pritzker and many of the progressives do not want these results being attributed to them and their policies. When a person makes a decision to allow their home to go into foreclosure, it’s not a decision they make lightly. It means that there’s no hope to recover. It is pretty much the last recourse.'”

The Olympian in Washington. “The Olympia Planning Commission has had two public hearings regarding code amendments aimed at relaxing commercial development requirements and increasing housing density in an area that already has more than 800 housing units and only a handful of nearby amenities. When the plan for Briggs Village was adopted more than 20 years ago, residents were promised a grocery store would be built in the ‘urban village’ neighborhood. Now, at the property developer’s request, the city is considering relaxing requirements around the size of a grocery store, and some worry the changes will mean no store will ever fill that space. Lahela Peterson lives in Briggs Village. She said the amendments will lead to ‘a glut of market-rate apartments that cost more than what I’m paying for my monthly mortgage and property taxes.”

From Bloomberg. “This spring was widely expected to be when the Canadian housing market finally perked up after nearly three years of weak sales. But then came US President Donald Trump’s tariff demands. Canadian housing markets tanked in March as the trade battles heated up. Nationwide, sales slumped about 9.3% from a year earlier, the lowest for the month since 2009, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. Transactions plunged nearly 17% in Calgary and 24% in the Toronto area. And in Vancouver, sales tumbled 13%. Eric Struk, a 23-year-old YouTube travel blogger in Toronto, said Trump’s tariff blitz has now caused him to delay his hunt for a two-bedroom condo he had been thinking about for the past six months.”

“With advertising revenue from his videos already dropping, the extra C$1,600 ($1,150) a month he’d have to pay on a mortgage over what he currently pays in rent has grown more unappealing. And though he already has the down payment he’d need, he fears the economy could get worse, and any property bought today might just drop in value tomorrow. ‘It’s not even just the stress of potentially getting a mortgage, it’s the stress of the uncertainty,’ Struk said. ‘Who knows what’s going to happen? Especially with Trump.'”

“In some ways, conditions are still more enticing than they were in recent years. Home prices are down nearly 16% from three years ago, inventories are building and borrowing costs are at the lowest in nearly three years. But the mounting uncertainty threatens to overpower some of those benefits. ‘It doesn’t matter that rates are dropping if you think you’re going to be out of a job,’ said Adil Dinani, a real estate broker in Vancouver. ‘You’re not going to buy real estate.’ ‘The market is extremely bad right now,’ said Brooke Hicks, a real estate broker in the city of Hamilton, a market outside Toronto where steel manufacturers are a major employer. ‘It’s almost weird being an agent because it’s so slow.'”

ABC News in Australia. “Harry Jang is a 24-year-old ACT resident, who’s hoping to buy his first home soon — a one or two-bedroom apartment. So, when the two major parties launched their big housing policies on the weekend, he was watching closely. Harry is interested in Labor’s idea to allow all Australians to buy their first home with a 5 per cent deposit. ‘My concern is whether the expansion to everybody, all first home buyers, whether that will increase housing prices,’ he said. He has a similar question about the Coalition plan to allow first homebuyers to deduct mortgage interest payments from their tax for five years. ‘If it increases demand, does that put more money into the pocket of some other person who I’m competing against?'”

“For other young Australians, there’s a lot they didn’t see in the weekend’s announcements. Jessica Broad is a 27-year-old Victorian and wants to see tax reform back on the agenda, specifically negative gearing, which Labor took to the 2019 election (and lost). ‘Limit the amount of investment properties one person can own. Straight off the bat,’ she said. ‘I kind of get why it’s in place, but it’s just sucking the wealth from the middle class to the wealthy class.'”

“Jemma Myors from NSW has just bought her first home — an apartment — in her mid-forties. She also says it’s time to revisit tax breaks for investors. ‘I think negative gearing needs to go, but I also feel like none of our current crop of politicians is willing to engage with that. I mean, after what happened to Bill Shorten — and he was only going to very lightly touch that issue — nobody’s going to go there.’ They also want to see action on barriers like planning restrictions on urban density, and stamp duty. ‘To be frank, it seems like a butt tonne of money that I have to find to pay to the government so that I can live in somewhere that I own, as opposed to somewhere that I rent,’ Jemma said.”