It’s Hugely Advantageous For Buyers Because They’re Getting Everything They Ask For

A report from WLOS in North Carolina. “Chris Hellier was excited to list her 1500-square-foot Fairview condo with sunset views in June, confident it would sell quickly at $425,000. ‘Everyone who comes in and looks at it, real estate agents, neighbors, say, ‘This is so beautiful. This is going to sell.’ And, it hasn’t,’ said Hellier. She’s now dropped the price to $400,000 and is considering another drop. ‘It’s been extremely stressful and just so shocking. The market has changed so quickly,’ Hellier said. ‘It’s definitely a buyer’s market,’ said Vivien Snyder with Beverly Hanks Realtors. Snyder said each day, Buncombe and Henderson Counties have about 20 homes listed and about 60 homes and units have price reductions. A browse through local listings will show homes at all price points sitting on the market, with many showing $10,000 or more in price drops. ‘I think Asheville’s a beautiful place,’ said Snyder. ‘But there are things affecting our out-of-town buyers.'”

“Snyder showed News 13 a million-dollar home in Fletcher on the market for 145 days with five price drops. As for sellers, she feels there is a market correction or adjustment after the higher sale prices. Many out-of-town buyers bought without visiting homes during Covid. Now it’s a new reality. ‘There are people hung up on what prices were a year ago and they are sort of sitting on the market,’ Snyder said.”

The Miami Herald in Florida. “Yachts drift by on a shimmering stretch of Biscayne Bay. That’s the view from Cynthia Muniz’s home on the eighth floor of her Brickell Key condominium. It was paradise. Now, it’s more of a golden cage. ‘You bought yourself a nightmare,’ she mumbled, her eyes tracing the interior walls of her condo. For a year, Muniz has struggled to sell the place. When she listed it for the first time last summer, she figured $390,000 was a fair asking price for 674 square feet plus a bay vista. But mounting maintenance fees and suffocating special assessments — neither of which she expects to ease anytime soon — have Muniz feeling that her home of two decades has become a bottomless money pit. She can hardly afford to keep living there. Buyers have taken notice. The unit’s new price tag: $300,000 —25% less than what Muniz had first asked for it.”

“In June, Miami-Dade’s condo inventory — the number of condos for sale —increased 36% year-over-year, according to a recent Miami Association of Realtors report. That translates to roughly 14 months of inventory. In 2022, Luisa, then 27, had saved up enough to make a down payment on a condo in Morningside, valued at $353,000. Her mortgage and maintenance fees swelled — eventually to the point of unsustainability. When she moved into her place, Luisa’s mortgage was $1,800 a month and maintenance was $530. Within two years, she was paying the bank $2,700 each month, plus nearly $1,000 to her condo association. She moved into an apartment and tried to rent out the condo to cover the mortgage but had to pay double rent for almost three tenantless months. She decided to sell, listing the unit for just over $400,000. No bites. Only after she knocked nearly $60,000 off the initial asking price was Luisa able to sell — for $7,000 less than what she had paid two years earlier. ‘I cried at the real estate attorney’s office. I was so sad,’ she recalled of the day she turned in her keys. Luisa estimates the whole ordeal left a $50,000 hole in her savings.”

The Los Vegas Business Press in Nevada. “If you’re shopping for a home right now, you’ve likely noticed more listings with price reductions. The housing market has cooled from the frenzy of the past few years. Higher interest rates and growing inventory mean buyers have more choices and are taking more time to decide. As a result, sellers can no longer rely on aggressive pricing to draw offers immediately. Many homes today are initially priced too high, based on outdated expectations of rapid appreciation. Sellers are learning that to stay competitive, they have to adjust. Not all reductions are created equal. A well-positioned price cut brings the home in line with current market data, typically just below similar active listings or recent pending sales. This is often referred to as a strategic correction, not a sign of desperation.”

NBC San Diego in California. “The San Diego metro area’s housing market has been red-hot for years. That’s now changing. The median sale price of a home in San Diego County was $917,500 in June, down 3.3% since last year, according to Redfin. Realtors are seeing the changes in the housing market up close. ‘It’s very challenging for sellers, for those of us that have listings, but it’s hugely advantageous for buyers because they’re getting everything they ask for,’ said Destiny Roxas, a broker associate with Remax Connections.”

ABC 7 in California. “Norm Weil has a problem. His building is surrounded by pristine high rises near 2nd and Howard streets. He admits, his is an eyesore. ‘We never had to board up our building before. This has been boarded up for a couple of years,’ a frustrated Weil told ABC7 News. ‘They discharged the fire extinguisher all over the place.’ All of the windows on the street level have been broken and inside, some of the doors and walls have bashed in. ‘They discharged the fire extinguisher all over the place,’ Weil said. ‘They’ is actually believed to be just one person. First name, Ricky, who lives outside of the building in a box. ‘This guy has been here since the pandemic,’ assured Weil.”

“When you search the address 594 Howard Street on Google Maps, Ricky’s cardboard box is visible – so is he. ‘It’s just not good. It hurts our ability in this challenging leasing market to lease this building,’ explained Matt Wolff, the real estate broker for the building. ‘I’ve seen him harming himself as well. It’s just a bad situation for him, for us and for the city,’ added Wolff. ‘He’s threatened to kill and rape me many times,’ revealed Gerard Madden, a tenant who leases space here. ‘He’s very violent. He has a scooter that he wheels around as a weapon, so it’s not a scooter this size, a smaller blade. He swings it around. He bangs everything. He’s constantly high, constantly screaming, shooting up in front of everybody. It’s pretty sad,’ said Madden.”

“At this point, you’re probably wondering where are the police in all of this? ‘The police came, they found him inside our building, nothing! Of they came, they took him away, he was back here two hours later,’ said Weil. Supervisor Matt Dorsey would like to see a drug-free sidewalk ordinance in San Francisco. ‘It is not helping our economy, it isn’t helping our businesses, it’s not helping our residents but least of all it’s not helping anybody who is on the streets struggling with addiction,’ insisted Dorsey. Meanwhile, Norm Weil’s frustration grows as he realizes he’s running out of options to remove Ricky. We asked him what would happen if he removed that box while he was away. ‘It’s happened. He gets another box,’ said Weil.”

My Northwest in Washington. “Swaths of homeless people have overrun Cal Anderson Park, with tents now lining the popular green space in Seattle’s Capitol Hill. But don’t tell that to the city of Seattle — a department spokesperson claims they’ve already ‘resolved’ the issue. Early last week, Quality of Life Coalition leader Saul Spady was at Cal Anderson Park meeting a friend when he noticed upwards of 30 tents all around the property. They made up roughly five ‘multi-tent encampments,’ in addition to errant singular tents. He said that ‘Probably the most shocking moment … a mother and a daughter came running up to me … and she’s like, ‘Oh my God, that man is urinating over there. He whipped out his ‘woohoo’ in front of my daughter.’ That’s horrible,’ Spady explained. ‘And then, well, I was walking around, of course, you get the whiffs of fentanyl, and it just reminds you that we really lost the plot in a lot of ways.'”

The Plain Dealer in Ohio. “When the owners of Reserve Square announced last week that they wouldn’t contest foreclosure proceedings on the hulking downtown building and blamed President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, it raised questions across the region. K&D Group CEO Doug Price said Trump’s immigration policies scared off returning or incoming students to nearby Cleveland State University and elsewhere, causing the occupancy rate at Reserve Square to plummet from 93% last June to below half now.”

“Court records indicate K&D had problems well before Trump’s second term began. It owes nearly $80 million in payments and faces foreclosure. On social media, people have said the building has been in decline for years. They have complained about security, noise levels, heating and air conditioning, bed bugs and the overall conditions, according to the posts on Reddit. K&D bought the building and an attached hotel in 2005 for a combined $43.2 million. In late December 2014, the company took out a 10-year, $93 million mortgage loan, in part to renovate the building, with 980 apartments. Less than six years later, K&D struck a short-term deal with Fannie Mae to pay less on the mortgage for several months. The agreement required making up that amount with higher payments in 2020 and 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic. ‘That’s only six years or so after the loan,’ former Cleveland State University real estate law professor Frederic White said. ‘I think that probably indicates that there were some unresolved issues paying off the loans.'”

“When it came time to pay off the remainder of the loan on Jan. 1, K&D still owed some $78 million, including $73.8 million on the principal. White said that means at the beginning of the loan, K&D planned on paying about $9 million each year toward the principal, but it ended up only averaging about $2 million per year. ‘Simple math tells you that,’ White said. ‘It strikes me that if they’ve only paid about $20 million in principal over a $90 million loan, what did they expect?’ Price last week said the occupancy rate stood at 93 percent last summer. Since then, he said, about 400 international students, mostly from India, left, including 300 in December alone.”

The Globe and Mail in Canada. “Davelle Morrison, broker with Bosley Real Estate, has recently worked with buyers in the Toronto condo market who are more willing to tune out the chaos that often emerges from the ongoing tariff rift. She has worked with buyers who are digging into previous listing prices, the length of time on market, and the amount the owner paid for the unit. ‘They want to know, how much wiggle room does that seller actually have?’ In cases where the owner purchased the unit within the past five years – before prices began to slide – buyers are less inclined to test the waters. ‘They figure they won’t be so easy to negotiate with because they’re going to be selling at a loss.'”

“Ms. Morrison recently worked with buyers who purchased a condo unit near Church and Bloor streets after it languished on the market for nearly two years. The renovated one-bedroom-plus-den at 100 Hayden St. was listed in September of 2023 with an asking price of $815,000. The sellers relisted the 775-square-foot unit with multiple price trims throughout 2024. A new listing agent took over this year and set the asking price at $679,000 in February. In May, the price was cut to $599,000. In July, Ms. Morrison’s clients purchased the unit for $570,000, which equals about $773 per square foot. Ms. Morrison observes that very few transactions are straightforward these days, and that leads to an increase in the number of testy sellers as properties sit or sell for less than the homeowner was hoping for. ‘Clients are a little more ornery,’ she says with a laugh.”

The Vancouver Sun. “‘We are not going back,’ Premier David Eby and Housing Minister Christine Boyle said Wednesday when asked separately about a push by large developers to get government to allow more foreign investment in real estate. In a letter Tuesday, some of the biggest names in B.C. real estate asked the federal government to reconsider its ban on foreign entities purchasing residential property in Canada, and for the B.C. government to reconsider its tax on foreign buyers. The letter argues that foreign investors form an important part of the presale condo market, and without them, fewer projects will sell enough pre-construction units to get financing.”

“On Wednesday, Boyle said she wouldn’t comment on what the federal government should do, ‘but certainly here in B.C., we’re not going to stop cracking down on speculation. We don’t want to go back to the days when foreign investors were buying up empty condos and leaving neighbourhoods empty and pushing up the prices for people and families. We’ll continue to do all of that work and continue to listen and talk through ideas,’ Boyle said. ‘But we are not going back to the Wild West days of empty condos, and foreign investment racking up the prices.'”

“Let me say this: We are not going back to the old model of doing things,’ Eby said. ‘Under the previous (provincial) government, the idea was if you welcome foreign investment into real estate, everybody’s going to benefit. And what we saw was real estate prices became completely detached from what people are actually able to earn in British Columbia, meaning that young people are priced-out of the housing market, and those prices are incredibly sticky. I accept that the old model of doing things is not working anymore. And frankly, I say good. If you want to see what the old market did, look at the CURV building project in the West End of the city of Vancouver, a site that started at $16 million by local developers that ended up being sold for $69 million after international money got involved. It was completely stupid and disconnected from what the local market can support.'”

“The CURV project is now mired in financial turmoil and facing receivership, its future unclear. ‘If foreign capital can help build housing for Canadians and British Columbians, great. But if the foreign capital is just housing that is going to sit empty in the middle of downtown Vancouver, like the CURV building, well, forget about it. That model is dead.'”