One Seller Won’t Negotiate? Fine, Go To The Next Seller

A report from Realtor.com. “Benjamin Catlett, of Zephyrhillis, FL, only managed to enjoy the bliss of being a homeowner for just over three years, before the worst happened. He shares that he was forced to demolish his three-bedroom, two-bathroom home after constant flooding destroyed it. ‘When I bought the property in 2021, they made me get flood insurance, which is pretty standard in Florida,’ he says. When he inquired about flood claims against the property, he was told there hadn’t been one since the 1970s. A new development was built next to Catlett’s in 2023, roughly 300 houses near his home—and he says that changed everything. ‘After that development was built, my yard started flooding when it would rain,’ he says. Then things went from bad to worse once Hurricane Helene hit in September 2024. ‘I couldn’t get into my house for three weeks, and when I was able to, there was mold growing four or five feet up the walls,’ he says. ‘There was no saving the house at that point.’ Despite receiving two payouts from his flood insurance and homeowners insurance, as well as $6,500 from FEMA to replace the contents of his home, the payouts did not come close to covering the $260,000 valuation of the house.”

“‘I can put a travel trailer on the property and live out of it, or I can sell it to investors for maybe $50,000, but that’s taking a major loss,’ he says. Catlett is vying to be accepted into a pilot program called Elevate Florida that helps hurricane victims rebuild, but he won’t hear back on that until August. ‘That’s my only hope,’ he says. ‘FEMA told me they are not buying out houses. The county doesn’t want to buy the property. I’m running out of options.’ At the moment, he’s living with his girlfriend while he and his neighbors consult with an attorney about next steps. ‘I’m in limbo,’ Catlett says. ‘My neighbors and I just want the county to buy our properties and let us move on.'”

The Miami Herald in Florida. “Condominium values are down across Miami-Dade County, with slight declines in the city of Miami and steeper slides on the coast as pressure from new state rules and weaker demand takes a hit on prices, according to the Property Appraiser’s Office. The figures mostly show that a red-hot market for Miami condos has shifted to one where buyers have far more leverage. As with most real estate data, bad news for owners means good news for buyers. Given the pace of sales, it would take 14 months to sell the nearly 14,000 condos that were listed across Miami-Dade in the spring, according to data from Scott Shuffield, a broker in Coral Gables with Berkshire Hathaway EWM Realty. That’s up from only seven months’ worth of condos for sale a year ago. ‘The most encouraging data is that we are seeing more inventory, and therefore more buyer choice,’ Shuffield said. Some of the largest value drops came from markets on or near the coast, where ocean views cost a premium. Condo values in Aventura dropped 4% at the start of the year, and they were down nearly 2% in Miami Beach.”

The Seattle Times in Washington. “Tech layoffs, economic uncertainty and high mortgage rates continue to keep a lid on the Seattle-area housing market. June marked a continuation of a sluggish year with more homeowners listing their properties for sale than a year ago, but many of those homes are lingering unsold and would-be homebuyers are hanging back, skittish about their budgets and job security. The Seattle area, including Tacoma and Bellevue, had 61% more homes for sale in May than the region averaged between 2017 and 2019, the third highest increase among major metro areas. That means buyers have more to choose from. For sellers, ‘The days where you could put up a sign and get lots of offers are perhaps paused for now,’ said Seattle Coldwell Banker Bain agent Ken Graff.”

“Layoffs and the rapid advance of AI have tech workers nervous about home buying, said Urban Living agent Matt Goyer. ‘These people who would normally be buying the $2 million to $5 million homes — all of a sudden they’re super skittish.’ Among those still hoping to buy sometime soon, their appetite for homes can vary drastically. Some detached houses remain in high demand while town home and condo listings struggle to find buyers. ‘You’re trying to sell the $1 million house around Green Lake? No problem, multiple offers. Trying to sell a $1 million town house? Yeah, sorry, you’re screwed,’ Goyer said. Those corners of the market with a glut of supply can offer a glimmer of hope for buyers able to bear the prices. Goyer recently worked with a buyer who wanted to offer a price he worried was ‘insultingly low’ for a town home on the market. To his surprise, the seller took it. In that segment of the local housing market, buyers find the upper hand. ‘One seller won’t negotiate?’ Goyer said. ‘Fine, go to the next seller.'”

The Wall Street Journal. “Millions of Americans bought homes in recent years with mortgage rates at 6.5% or higher, often betting they could refinance to a lower rate within a year or two. Now, with little hope of a rate cut in July after a solid jobs report on Thursday, many of these owners face the predicament of paying those higher costs for longer than they expected. This real estate adage that a buyer should ‘marry the house and date the rate’ has often worked in the past. Millions of homeowners refinanced in 2020 and 2021 when mortgage rates fell to historic lows. But rates haven’t dropped below 6% since September 2022, and economists don’t expect a return to the lows of a few years ago. ‘There is definitely a buyer pool that is feeling the constraints of the rates that they’re in and bummed that they can’t refinance,’ said Stacey Melton, vice president at Reasy Financial in Peoria, Ariz. ‘I’m still getting calls on the daily from people who want to refinance, and it just unfortunately isn’t making sense for them.'”

“When Justin and Marissa Dance bought a house in Chubbuck, Idaho, in 2023, they negotiated for the seller to pay to lower their mortgage rate for the first two years of the loan. Their rate was set to rise to 6.99% in September, which would have cost them an extra $400 a month. Their third child is due in August. They refinanced in May into a five-year balloon loan at a 5.99% rate. The remaining loan balance is due at the five-year mark, but the Dances expect to refinance again before then, he said. ‘Last time, I thought for sure that [mortgage rates would fall], so I guess that’s humbled me a bit,’ he said. ‘We’re expecting the worst but hoping for the best.'”

CBS News on California. “The Skid Row Care Campus officially opened this spring with ample offerings for people living on the streets of this historically downtrodden neighborhood. Skid Row’s first methadone clinic is set to open here this year. For those not ready to quit drugs or alcohol, the campus provides clean syringes to more safely shoot up, glass pipes for smoking drugs, naloxone to prevent overdoses, and drug test strips to detect fentanyl contamination, among other supplies. ‘We get a really bad rap for this, but this is the safest way to use drugs,’ said Darren Willett, director of the Center for Harm Reduction on the new Skid Row Care Campus. ‘It’s an overdose prevention strategy, and it prevents the spread of infectious disease.'”

“State Sen. Roger Niello, a Republican who represents conservative suburbs outside Sacramento, says the state needs to improve the lives of homeless people through stricter drug policies. He argues that providing drug supplies or offering housing without a mandate to enter treatment enables homeless people to remain on the streets. Proposition 36, he said, needs to be implemented forcefully, and homeless people should be required to enter treatment in exchange for housing. ‘I think of it as tough love,’ Niello said. ‘What Los Angeles is doing, I would call it harm encouragement. They’re encouraging harm by continuing to feed a habit that is, quite frankly, killing people.’ Just outside the Skid Row Care Campus, Cindy Ashley organized her belongings in a cart after recently leaving a local hospital ER for a deep skin infection on her hand and arm caused by shooting heroin. She also regularly smokes crack, she said. She was frantically searching for a home so she could heal from two surgeries for the infection. She learned about the new care campus and rushed over to get her name on the waiting list for housing. ‘I’m not going to make it out here,’ she said, in tears.”

The Globe and Mail. “Across Canada, you could hear the eyes of Gen Zers rolling. The headline in The Globe said it all: ‘CMHC gives up on comparing housing affordability to 2004 levels.’ Where a previous headline-making report by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the federal agency whose stated purpose is to make housing affordable, had set out a series of policies aimed at returning housing costs, relative to income, to 2004 levels – by 2030 – the new report dismisses this as ‘no longer realistic.’ So the CMHC now suggests a target of 30 per cent or 2019 levels, whichever is higher. That in itself will be a stretch in some cases. Housing costs in Toronto and Vancouver in 2019 were 59 per cent and 71 per cent of income, respectively. And the measures required to get there remain every bit as heroic as the CMHC had earlier assessed would be needed to get back to 2004 levels.”

“There has been much absolutist rhetoric to the effect that House Prices Must Fall if affordability is to be restored – more, that is, than they already have (housing prices in Toronto are currently 16 per cent off their 2022 peak). Again, for most of the country, that’s simply not true. And if massive increases in supply are what we are after, it is a little hard to square with the kind of massive decreases in prices – 37 per cent, if the task of restoring affordability were to be achieved without help from rising incomes – demanded in certain quarters. The vast majority of new housing construction, under any realistic scenario, will have to be funded privately. It defies reason to think that private capital would put that kind of money into a collapsing market.”

“There is a reason people in government are averse to the idea. It isn’t just that homeowners represent the majority of the population, and the electorate. It is that for years they have been encouraged to plan their retirements around them. Knock out a big chunk of their wealth in an ill-advised dash for ‘affordability’ and you will not just have a lot of angry voters on your hands, but – especially given Canada’s alarming levels of private debt – an economic crisis.”

From The Times. “John Brynmor Hughes and his wife inherited a five-bedroom home in the idyllic village of Abersoch in Gwynedd — but they were soon desperate to sell it. Unless they could get rid of the property with 12 months it would cost them £5,000 a year in council tax, because Welsh local authorities have the power to charge second-home owners up to 300 per cent more. The punishing tax rises are designed to free up homes for local buyers who are being priced out of the market, and similar powers have now been extended to councils in Scotland and England. However, second-home owners are finding that their properties simply will not sell — leaving them caught in a costly tax trap. The Brynmor Hugheses sold their inherited property to second-home buyers in late 2023 at a big discount.”

“When the couple inherited the house from her father in 2022 they faced an annual council tax bill of £5,000 if they could not sell it within 12 months of probate being granted. Yet they had just one viewing in a year, despite listing the property with two estate agents. ‘The bottom has fallen out of the housing market in Abersoch and prices are dropping throughout the area,’ said Brynmor Hughes, 72, an independent councillor and retired pub landlord. ‘The second-home premium is a killer. A lot of local people I grew up with are now inheriting their parent’s houses and having to sell them, or at least trying to, because they can’t afford to pay the extra council tax.”

“Robin Edwards from the property buying agency Curetons said it was not unusual for some second homes to be stuck on the market for a year or more. He said: ‘There is a huge surplus of properties for sale, more than we have seen in the past ten years, and especially so in second-home locations. Lots of buyers made a snap decision in the pandemic when they couldn’t go abroad and are now really regretting it. The good stock goes quickly, and the rest gets stuck.’ Edwards said: ‘In Devon, Cornwall and other rural locations we know of lots of sellers who overpaid in the pandemic and are now making significant drops in their price just to get rid of the property. Losses can easily be hundreds of thousands of pounds. But they simply can’t afford to keep a second home, especially if they are priced in the middle of the market and are paying council tax premiums. The numbers just don’t add up anymore.'”