Investors Are Not Going To Get Even Close To What The Top Of The Market Was

A report from the Lake Oswego Review in Oregon. “The nationwide housing market slowdown is also taking place in the Lake Oswego area, some local real estate agents say. ‘It’s a fun market. In 2021-22, it was a fast food real estate market. People were running through the drive-thru and saying, ‘I’ll take a $3 million house and a fry.’ said Terry Sprague, owner of Luxe | Forbes Global Properties. Will Fendon of Fendon Properties said sellers need to address needed repairs and make their homes look as nice as possible. ‘In some neighborhoods, it’s a price war and a beauty contest — and sellers have to win both,’ he said.”

WCNC in North Carolina. “After people in multiple parts of the Charlotte area closed on new homes in neighborhoods under construction, a WCNC Charlotte investigation found work on the remaining houses stopped. The stalled projects, the result of financial problems with the developer, left homeowners stuck for roughly a year, living next to unfinished and unsafe construction sites. ‘You see rods sticking out. You see tall grass,’ said Alex Oleksy. ‘There’s a roof being held by a 2×4. Looks unstable. We have to look at that every single day. It’s concerning and I think about the safety.’ Just a half-hour drive north up I-77, Dolphus Lee shares similar frustrations. ‘I didn’t think it was going to look this way,’ the Marine veteran said. ‘It’s depressing.’ It’s especially bothersome because Oleksy paid $650 in a one-time HOA capital contribution at closing, yet he said the homeowners don’t even have control of the neighborhood. ‘The community doesn’t own the HOA now,’ Oleksy added. ‘The developer owns it until they finish the last home.'”

“‘Based on the latest information, the properties in question are now owned by mortgage companies or banks, as both Helmsman Homes and Nest Homes are no longer in operation,’ Iredell County Director of Building Standards Robby Wilkinson told WCNC Charlotte in early May. ‘From what I understand, this situation stems from financial mismanagement by one of the owners.’ A town of Mooresville spokesperson, meanwhile, indicated there is at least one other unfinished Nest Homes community in Mooresville, Lake Walk.”

From CBS News. “While Hurricane Milton made landfall on Florida’s west coast in October 2024, it was the tornadoes on the east coast that delivered the most tragic blow, particularly in Fort Pierce. Michael Bass, whose concrete home withstood the storm, has decided to move out of the neighborhood. He said the trauma is now built into the view. ‘I got feedback from the open houses that, you know, ‘I don’t want to live in your devastation.’ That’s when it dawned on me,’ Bass said.”

Pro Publica on Texas. “The former operator of one of the largest HomeVestors of America franchises has agreed to plead guilty to federal wire fraud in connection with a sprawling Ponzi scheme targeting people who believed they were investing in his real estate empire. Charles Carrier owned Dallas-based C&C Residential Properties, one of the most successful franchises in the HomeVestors chain, which is known for its ‘We Buy Ugly Houses’ slogan. HomeVestors terminated Carrier’s franchise in October 2024, after receiving a tip that he had been defrauding investors. Carrier took loans from investors to finance his house-flipping business, initially using the money to buy and renovate older houses to sell for a profit. The fact that Carrier’s plea deal contains only a single charge left some victims even more angry. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Ron Carver, who lost $300,000 and whose father lost $200,000 before he died. ‘They will let him plead out and he might get a slap on the wrist.'”

ABC 7 in California. “‘The inventory has finally gone up. We’ve had really low inventory it’s been really tough. We’re finally getting inventory, and I was thinking buyers are going to come in and we’re going to start really moving, but it hasn’t happened,’ said Jennie Izumi, a realtor with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Crest Real Estate. The market shift is seen in Los Angeles, where the median sale price hovers around $900,000 and sellers outnumber buyers by about 45%. Izumi, who has nearly 16 years of experience as a realtor, says despite the increase in sellers, she believes buyers are scared. ‘I think they’re scared. They’re afraid of the interest rate. They’re afraid of making the payment and they’re afraid that if the market does changeover that they could possibly be upside down,’ Izumi said.”

The Westside Current. “These three properties, totaling more than 200 rooms, were funded through California’s multibillion-dollar Project Homekey initiative, which was launched during the pandemic and intended to provide fast, permanent shelter to unhoused individuals and families. Not a single person lives in them. These are not isolated cases. Although the City of Los Angeles has spent about $820 million in Project Homekey funds to acquire approximately 1,237 units, 44 percent remain vacant. The conversion rate is even worse among the 32 Project Homekey properties the county paid $550 million to acquire. Of the 2,157 rooms purchased, 1,538—or 71 percent—remain vacant.”

“In Sunland, the city paid $17.7 million for a 62-unit building on Hillhaven Avenue, a deal described by the listing broker as ‘the most expensive building ever sold’ in that ZIP code. In Canoga Park, a developer who built a 101-unit complex on Vanowen Street for $39 million sold it to the city for $55.2 million. It remains empty. In Cheviot Hills, meanwhile, the nonprofit Weingart Center acquired a 76-unit assisted living facility on Shelby Drive in 2024 with Homekey Funds for $27.3 million. Records show that just 12 days earlier, a private firm had purchased the same property for $11.2 million. This means it was flipped and resold to Weingart with city approval for more than twice the price. Asked to explain the discrepancy, city officials pointed only to an appraisal submitted by Weingart.”

Denverite in Colorado. “The local historian Mark Barnhouse described 16th Street as ‘the heart of a great city’ in his book about the 1.7-mile commercial strip. But lately, that heart has been struggling to pump blood. Boosters long heralded it as a must-visit destination, a concentration of the best Denver has to offer. But in the last five years, downtown’s restaurants, retail, tourism and commercial real estate have all been upended. Reviewers on TripAdvisor have described the mall as ‘boring,’ ‘a creepy ghost town,’ and a ‘sketchy Skid Row type street with zero stores.’ Literally and figuratively, one visitor said, the 16th Street Mall ‘stank.’ Meanwhile, office vacancy rates have ballooned, rising from just under 10 percent to over 27 percent, as more people began working from home.”

“‘I don’t know what’s in the minds of the owners of these buildings and when they will realize that sitting on an empty building or keeping two stories empty doesn’t make sense,’ said Susan Powers, a longtime downtown Denver resident and affordable housing developer. ‘They need to lower the rates.’ Property owners still in control of their property are offering concessions — like months of free rent — or are patiently waiting for the market to bounce back instead of dropping rents, explained Amy Aldridge, a commercial broker with Tributary Real Estate. Others, facing foreclosure, have nothing to lose. ‘They don’t need to lease a building that they’re going to lose,’ Aldridge said.”

The Daily Hive in Canada. “A developer in Surrey City Centre is turning to an aggressive discount strategy reminiscent of past housing downturns to attract prospective homebuyers in today’s more cautious market. This Saturday, May 31, 2025, Square Nine Developments will hold a one-day, on-location, discounted flash sale for its newly completed ‘Belvedere’ condominium tower project, offering 25 per cent off the original prices for its move-in-ready, concrete-built homes. The reduced prices bring the average cost down to $720 per sq. ft. — a sharp contrast to the $1,125 per sq. ft. seen in other comparable concrete developments in the area, according to the developer. ‘It’s a Warehouse Sale… but for Condos,’ reads a listing for Saturday’s ‘CONDODAY’ sale event.”

“Upon inquiry, Cam Good, a partner at Key Marketing, the company leading the sales initiative, told Daily Hive Urbanized that during the initial launch in 2021, the developer kept all of the penthouses to sell at higher prices closer to the project’s completion — when end users could see the final product and the views for themselves. ‘The market changed and foiled that plan,’ said Good. ‘This isn’t a pre-sale — it’s a real sale,’ said Good. ‘The margin’s been taken out so buyers can get in.’ The flash sale approach draws parallels to the bulk sale strategies used during the 2008 financial crisis, when developers slashed prices to move unsold inventory.”

The Globe and Mail in Canada. “Speculators who bought in some new Toronto-area subdivisions are flooding the market with single-family homes for rent, driving down prices in an effort to cover their costs. ‘I don’t suspect these are investment properties by design, but rather by necessity,’ said Michael Waters, CEO of Minto Group, who said that in his company’s experience rental-investors are more rare in the detached new house market, compared to the condominium space. ‘I suspect that what we’re seeing here is that buyers who bought in the boom – early 2021 and 2022 – are now taking delivery of their home. In many cases they may have been speculating based on the resale market, but they are not seeing the prospect to resell the home at a premium to what they paid.'”

“Brandon Sage, a property manager and real estate investment adviser with LandLord Property and Rental Management, said new subdivisions are seeing the impact of a previous wave of investment buying. Mr. Sage said there are newly constructed communities across the Greater Toronto Area, often on the edge of the rural boundaries, that are near to being oversaturated with rentals. So many competing rental properties makes it harder for each property to secure good tenants and top rents. ‘What isn’t being contemplated [by some investors] is that you’re buying into a neighbourhood that you’re going to have 50 other properties that go up for lease at the same time,’ he said. ‘Now they are not selling the house because they are not going to get the even close to what the top of the market was. They want to rent it out to bridge the time between how the market is now and when they hope it will recover; it’s a gamble on their part.”

The Windsor Star in Canada. “The Windsor area is seeing a jump in mortgage holders unable to make their monthly payments. But the local six-per-cent hike in delinquent mortgages of 90-plus days since the beginning of 2024 pales in comparison to the 71.5 per cent spike for all of Ontario. ‘We’re not seeing much on the delinquency side,’ said mortgage broker Joe Bondy, co-owner of Dominion Lending Centre’s Super Mortgage Team in Windsor. ‘I think a lot of those numbers have more to do with Toronto condos being underwater.’ There are also more multi-generational purchases being seen as well, as parents co-sign with their children. ‘Builders can’t build a new home for $300,000 to $400,000 anymore,’ Bondy said. ‘Now, it’s closer to $800,000 for a new-build, so you almost have to have two families and two incomes. We’ve seen this in the Toronto area for a long time, but now we’re seeing it in Windsor.'”