A Buyers’ Market Has Formed As Sharply Lower Sales Have Run Into A Wall Of Supply

It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “Real-estate agent Meme Loggins recently worked with a home buyer who offered $50,000 below the asking price for a four-bedroom, 3,350-square-foot home in the city of Beaverton, Ore. Over the last few weeks, such offers have become increasingly common in that market, Loggins, who is an agent with Redfin, told MarketWatch. In contrast to the last five years, ‘everybody wants a deal,’ she added. The first surprise came when the sellers accepted the offer. ‘I picked my jaw up off the floor just in time to say thank you,’ Loggins told MarketWatch. But the buyer then came back with another, bigger surprise: After all that effort to score a big discount, she was going to walk away from the purchase. Citing reasons such as the uncertain economic and political outlook, the buyer terminated the sale. She said she wanted to wait a couple of months before buying a house. The buyer ‘just got very nervous about it,’ Loggins said.”

“For over two decades, I’ve been immersed in the real estate industry. But rarely have I witnessed a time when so many different forces are converging to reshape the landscape so rapidly — especially here in North Carolina. I recently hosted a candid, no-fluff conversation with Sandy McAlpine — a veteran broker who’s closed over $1 billion in transactions and now leads successful real estate teams in both Lake Norman and Myrtle Beach. What we uncovered during our discussion was clear: this is not just a cooling market — it’s a market in flux. Short-term rental investors are facing a new kind of pain. In places like Myrtle Beach, over 3,000 condos are currently sitting on the market. Occupancy rates have plunged from 70% to 42%. Nightly rates are falling. HOA fees are climbing. And many of these buildings are now issuing massive special assessments. To make matters worse, many owners financed their units using short-term ARM loans that are now adjusting upward, creating payment shocks many simply cannot absorb. Bottom line: the COVID Airbnb gold rush is over. Vacation travel has declined, inflation is squeezing household budgets, and the ‘easy money’ days are gone. Unless you bought in cash and manage your property like a business, you’re probably underwater — or dangerously close.”

“For more than a year, we have listened to the stories from condo owners across Tampa Bay and the State of Florida about how crippling HOA fees and sky-high insurance continue to crush the condo market, pushing many out of paradise. ‘I’ve seen my condo HOAs at $450, double in two years to $900 and I’ve seen thousands of dollars in assessments. That’s what it’s cost us,’ said Fran Sullivan, a condo owner in St. Pete. ‘A lot of people here were financially strapped for doing this, myself included, to come up and say, I need $10,000 in three months for most of us is not a realistic thing,’ said St. Pete condo owner, Tyler Clee. ‘A lot of the HOA fees are insurance because of the things that have happened. It would have been nice if they addressed that more than loaning people money.'”

“‘To say, ‘Listen, I have a couple 100,000 people who have 100% equity in their unit. They’ve never put a dime away for the last 30 years, but they want state state money’. Bailout is not a really attractive presentation to my colleagues,’ Senator Jason Pizzo said. Senator Jen Bradley agreed. ‘In terms of a statewide program, you know, in terms of our fiscal constraints, the dollars that would be required for that would be probably close to a billion dollars, and that’s just not something that is is really feasible,’ she said.”

“Leo Behaj is still recovering financially from an expensive — and regrettable — decision. ‘I said to my friends, I said, ‘From an American dream, it can become an American nightmare,’ Behaj said. When Behaj immigrated to the United States from Albania 15 years ago with his wife, Irena, the couple settled in Ipswich along the North Shore of Massachusetts. Years later, they decided to purchase a home in Reading. ‘I was a new landlord,’ Behaj said. ‘I was just trying to rent it for a couple of years.’ In 2021, Behaj signed his first lease with Bryan Coombes and his wife, Nicole Inserra. Almost immediately after moving into the property, the couple had complaints about the house and the rent checks stopped.”

“Behaj, a branch manager at a bank, took on a second job as an Uber driver to pay the bills and avoid a foreclosure of the Reading property. Behaj said the financial strain cancelled birthday parties and family vacations so he could afford paying two mortgages. Behaj said his family lost about $95,000 in unpaid rent and legal fees after dealing with Coombes and Inserra for more than two years. Instead of moving his family, he sold the home in Reading to begin to climb out of debt. The last text message that Behaj said he received from Coombes was an emoji of a middle finger on eviction day. ‘We provided them the house for free, the funds to move left and right … taxpayer money,’ Behaj said. ‘He goes to court, he doesn’t pay a fee because it’s an eviction — I’m paying the fee. Welcome to America! What can I say? Free everything.'”

“For three decades, the city and county of Los Angeles managed California’s biggest homelessness crisis together. But after scathing audits criticizing the homeless authority, the county is blowing up that joint agency and starting over. In San Diego, a 150-bed shelter created as a partnership between the city and county is in jeopardy, as both sides squabble over who should pay for what. In the San Joaquin Valley, the city of Turlock is refusing to let Stanislaus County fund a shelter there. A state bill that would have forced counties to pay for half the cost of city-run homeless shelters faced fierce pushback from counties, and was swiftly gutted.”

“‘It’s not about the dollar — it’s about accountability,’ Turlock Mayor Amy Bublak said in an interview with CalMatters. The shelter is open at night, but during the day, the people who sleep there have nowhere to go – and nowhere to use the bathroom, Bublak said. As a result, the nearby businesses are complaining of public urination and other disruptions, she said. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan is leading a push to open about 1,000 new temporary housing units this year, mostly in converted motels and tiny homes – and he wants Santa Clara County to provide case management services to the residents. ‘We have basically reached our limit,’ Mahan said. ‘We can’t defund core city services that are already understaffed. So if the county doesn’t step in…We can’t scale anymore, which means we leave thousands of people outside.'”

“Economic uncertainty drove home sales and prices down again in B.C.’s Lower Mainland in April and pushed the market deeper into buyers’ territory. A buyers’ market has formed as sharply lower sales have run into a wall of supply. New listings, while easing, remain elevated and are adding to the pool of stale units already on the market. Active listings have climbed to nearly 25,000 units, the highest in more than a decade. Prices have fallen, with the average price down 6.1 per cent year-over-year to $1.148 million. Similarly, benchmark prices, which adjust for unit and geographic composition, fell 1.5 per cent month over month and were 2.1 per cent lower year-over-year. Price declines have been concentrated in multi-family units over the past year reflecting excess supply.”

“Two Cheshire towns named among the county’s ‘best places to live’ have seen house prices plummet by more than 20 per cent, according to new figures. Both Knutsford and Wilmslow are named in a report ranking all neighbourhoods in Cheshire based on their property price reduction. Wilmslow – part of the Cheshire Golden Triangle where Premier League footballers reside – saw the biggest drop, down from an average of £575,000 to £416,800. That represents a fall of 27.5 per cent. South Knutsford & Bexton had the county’s third biggest tumble – 21.9 per cent – with the average house price down from £617,500 to £482,500. Also named in the guide was Malpas – described as ‘a prestigious address’ that is in high demand. The Cheshire town – along with Churton and Farndon – was ranked tenth in the table of neighbourhoods where house prices had fallen the most. They dropped by 15.2 per cent.”

“It’s an affluent, inner city suburb with tree-lined streets where homes sell for about $1.3 million. It is surrounded by a hub of bustling cafes and small businesses, but there is one thing tarnishing Ninth Avenue in Inglewood, Perth: an apartment complex. In six months, police have been called to the complex 306 times. ‘Our community is scared,’ local Melissa Molinari told 7NEWS. ‘There’s yelling, screaming, people being attacked, people being shouted at, verbally and racially abused.’ Mobile vision captured inside and around the complex lays bare the shocking behaviour. In one video a woman is dragged by the hair near the front entrance. On the night of Saturday, May 10, a 34-year-old who lives nearby the complex was allegedly attacked in a carpark across the road while out for dinner with his girlfriend. It is a scene that is still playing over and over in the head of the victim’s father. ‘People have been verbally abused, had knives waved at them. This wasn’t in a sleazy alley somewhere. This was in central Inglewood,’ he said.”

“Nearly all Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET)-listed residential developers with quarterly revenue of at least 2.5 billion baht reported year-on-year declines in both revenue and net profit in the first quarter, mainly due to the economic slowdown and higher mortgage loan rejection rates. Pruksa Holding ranked fourth in revenue with 3.7 billion baht, but came last in net profit, posting just 13 million baht, a year-on-year decline of 11% and 80%, respectively. ‘The low profit was primarily due to discounts on units in long-standing unsold projects, but it marked an improvement from the loss recorded in the fourth quarter of last year,’ said Jintana Insee, Pruksa’s acting group chief financial officer.”