Unfamiliar Pangs Of Withdrawal After Having The Needle Of Untaxed Capital Gains Partially Removed From Its Arm

A report from WHMI. “Home sales increased for the second straight month while inventory was at a five-year high for July in Southeast Michigan, per the latest numbers released by Realcomp for July. Griffith Realty President Scott Griffith talked with WHMI about sellers still trying to cash in, but interest rates are starting to slow buyers – speculating we could even see a slowdown in the housing market soon. In Livingston County, total sales were up 17.8% year-over-year; with a $425,000 median sales price. Washtenaw County was $440,000, Oakland County was $387,500, and Genesee County stood at $224,000. For Livingston County, Griffith commented he thinks that that price will ‘take the wind out of the sails for a lot of buyers’ – recognizing it’s a supply and demand world but at some point affordability comes in. Local listings year-over-year were up 20.1% – with many people still trying to cash in on the high prices. Griffith said he thinks a little bit of why listings are surging is the feeling – which he thinks is a popular belief – that things might slow down. He said people are looking at the opportunity to maximize their price now so there seems to be more activity – adding that ironically drives prices down when there’s more supply but they’ll see if that proves to be true or not. At some point, there will be certain breaking point. Griffith said nationally sales are down 2% and have been going down for a while and those markets that are down the most, tend to be the ones that had the greatest run up and were the most expensive. He said people can expect the same here in that prices at some point will have just sort of pushed as much as they can for a while and they have to acclimate.”

The Bangor Daily News. “More Mainers are overpricing their home, often causing them to sit on the market longer and ultimately reducing the homeowners’ profits, according to local real estate agents. That includes homes recently priced anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 more than they should be, one real estate agent has seen. ‘When they overprice, the home sits on the market longer,’ said Jeff Harris, Maine Association of Realtors president and a broker at Harris Real Estate in Farmington. ‘Even $25,000 or $30,000 overpriced is enough to slow that home from selling quickly.’ The housing frenzy Maine witnessed during and immediately after the pandemic where buyers were routinely offering above asking and waived home inspections in order to secure a property is over, Harris said. But, some sellers haven’t realized or accepted that. The average home price in Maine rose to $425,000 — the highest in at least a decade — last month, the Maine Association of Realtors reported, ‘but that doesn’t mean every house is worth $425,000,’ Harris said.”

“That overpriced homes aren’t selling as fast also suggests that Maine’s housing market is shifting from being a seller’s market — where high demand and low inventory forces prices up — to a more balanced market, said Judy Oberg, president-elect of the Maine Association of Realtors and an agent at Bridgton-based Oberg Real Estate. ‘People need to pay attention and be flexible,’ Oberg said. ‘It’s still a good, strong market, but it’s changing.’ Homes listed for more than they’re worth are leading to more expired and canceled listings now than in the past five years, said Dava Davin, CEO of Portside Real Estate in southern Maine. ‘The number one reason homes sit for a long time or don’t sell is that they are priced too high,’ Davin said. Sellers price their homes for more than they should because they want the cost of their former home to pay for the price of their new one, but that rarely happens, Harris said.”

From WJLA. “The housing market in Washington, D.C., continued to shift over the summer as it turned into more of a buyer’s market. It’s a good sign for people who have been sitting on the sidelines — waiting to buy a home. Real estate firm Bright MLS reported that inventory is up 50% compared to last year. That means buyers are finding more homes to choose from and more bargaining power. ‘Homes are taking a little bit longer to sell, and sellers have to be really careful about how they price their home,’ said Bright MLS Chief Economist Lisa Sturtevant. ‘Affordability is a constraint. We are seeing some housing market activity related to people losing their jobs with the federal government. I think buyers who are waiting for rates to fall are going to remain on the sidelines this fall. So I expect we’ll continue to see buyer demand relatively slow in the fall. I do expect we’ll see prices soften, and perhaps year-over-year price declines in the fall.'”

“Sturtevant said suburban markets, including Fairfax and Loudoun Counties in Virginia, are still seeing very fast home sales — some in just a week, and prices rising year over year. Montgomery County’s housing market is looking a bit weaker, mainly due to a high concentration of federal government workers. In D.C., the sale of condos has slowed. First-time buyers are now averaging 38 years old — compared to 28 a decade ago– and they’re opting for close-in single-family homes with more space for their families. More contracts are also falling through. Buyers are making an offer, and those contracts aren’t making it to closing.”

From Longboat Key News. “Florida reported a year-over-year increase in single-family home sales for the first time since January – a rise of 2.8 percent in June. This is a change in tone from the recent downward trend in the state’s struggling housing market, according to the latest data by Florida Realtors. Falling prices might have helped: in June, the median sale price of a single-family home in the Sunshine State was $412,000, down 3.5 percent from a year earlier though still up a staggering 46 percent from 2020. Over the past couple of years, Florida built more new homes than any other state in the country in an attempt to meet demand. But in the meantime, as mortgage rates suddenly shot to 6-7 percent and employers started issuing return-to-office orders, demand cooled down. The Sunshine State—especially its most overheated markets—has found itself with more homes for sale than buyers are willing to purchase under the current situation. Facing dwindling interest and falling sales, sellers in Florida have increasingly slashed their asking prices in recent months, while some markets—like Tampa—are reporting double-digit+ price drops.”

Mansion Global on Nevada. “Sin City is seeing a surge in luxury home listings. The inventory of homes listed for $1 million and above in Las Vegas was up 42% annually in July, according to a report from Realtor.comy. That’s more than double the national increase of 20.3%. With this influx of luxury homes for sale, prices are falling rather drastically. Prices for homes in the 90th percentile—around $1.2 million and more—are down 12.2% year over year, much higher than the national price decrease of 1.14%. The more expensive the homes get, the greater the price decrease: The top 5% of listings, priced at $2 million and up, have seen prices drop 18.3%, triple the national average, according to the report.”

“The city’s trophy homes are struggling even more. For the top 1% of luxury homes, which start at about $5.8 million, prices have fallen 15.2% annually, compared with the nationwide drop of 6.78%. ‘Las Vegas luxury real estate is entering a new chapter, where bigger homes and rising inventory no longer guarantee bigger returns,’ said Anthony Smith, senior economist at Realtor.com. ‘Even as demand from out-of-state buyers holds steady, today’s luxury sellers are having to adjust both price and expectations.'”

The Durham Post in Canada. “Since the Greater Toronto Area’s real estate market peaked in early 2022, some neighbourhoods have seen staggering declines in house prices. In fact, in 10 neighbourhoods across the GTA, the median sale price of a single-family home fell by 40 per cent over a period of three years, according to the latest research from Wahi, a Canadian real estate listing website and app. Four Brampton neighbourhoods were within the top 10 in terms of seeing the largest percentage drops in median sale prices, with Huttonville (-53 per cent) accounting for the steepest decline in the GTA. The other Brampton neighbourhoods in the top 10 are Vales of Humber (-50 per cent), Northwood (-44 per cent), and Westgate (-40 per cent).”

“These neighbourhoods are at the extreme end of price declines during the past two and a half years. However, the downward trend has been widespread, with 289 of the 344 neighbourhoods that Wahi analyzed having lower prices this year than in April 2022. Looking at declines by dollar amount, the median price in 10 neighbourhoods across the GTA plunged by $1 million since spring three years ago. Six of the 10 neighbourhoods that recorded the largest drop on a dollar basis were located within the City of Toronto, led by Windfields. In Windfields, an upscale North York neighbourhood, the median price of a single-family home was $3,270,000 last month. That represents a jaw-dropping decline of $3,105,000 in the median sale price over a three-year period. It’s also more than $1 million more than the second-largest drop, which occurred in Wanless Park, another affluent North York community. There, the median single-family home price nosedived by $1,967,500 to $2,182,500.”

The Financial Post in Canada. “Holly Calderwood has worked in the Vancouver real estate industry for two decades, and there’s only been a handful of times when she has seen the housing market this bad. ‘I think the last time I saw this was in 2008-2009 during the financial crisis,’ she said. ‘And in 2020 during COVID-19.’ Calderwood has built a career specializing in selling luxury real estate from condos to waterfront properties, and she has recently noticed both a decline in sales and prices, as well as a rise in foreclosures. ‘It really picked up last year, but this year, too,’ she said. ‘A lot of foreclosures and then you just see the price dropping. Sometimes people are losing a couple of million.'”

“Economists and industry insiders say some markets have entered a buyer’s market for the first time in years, with cities such as Toronto, Vancouver and even Calgary recording significant drops in sales activity and posting record highs in inventory. That could be a sign of price bubbles bursting, which is welcome news for would-be buyers, but could also spell trouble for the Canadian economy, which has relied on housing in recent years as an important economic driver. ‘We have had a structural shift in interest rates,’ Charles St-Arnaud, chief economist at Alberta Central, said. ‘That changed the affordability equation quite significantly for many markets.'”

“In May, Canada’s newly appointed Housing Minister Gregor Robertson said the quiet part out loud when he was asked whether house prices should go down. ‘No, I think that we need to deliver more supply, make sure the market is stable,’ he said during a scrum on Parliament Hill. ‘It’s a huge part of our economy.’ Residential investment contributed 10 per cent to Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2021 during the pandemic housing boom and 7.5 per cent in 2023. The total value of housing assets grew to $4.2 trillion last year, representing 25 per cent of national wealth. Condo prices in Toronto’s surrounding suburbs are recording even more significant drops than in the city itself, according to a recent report by Moody Analytics. For example, prices in Halton Hills have fallen by as much as 50 per cent from their peak.”

“Investor participation in the real estate market has also been criticized for turning housing into an asset and for taking capital away from other productive parts of the economy. Canada’s lagging business investment and productivity are longstanding issues. But many regular homeowners often use their houses as a funding source for retirement or it may be the only major asset they own. ‘We can think about the boomers who are sitting on big appreciation in their house values, but we can also think of recent buyers who probably overstretched themselves to get on the market,’ St-Arnaud said. ‘How do we deal with that if in 25 years they have zero appreciation on their main asset and they can’t save for anything else?'”

The Spinoff in New Zealand. “Christine Fletcher and Troy Churton’s recent treatise on why we shouldn’t let people build so much housing in Auckland is mostly standard fare. The Albert-Eden-Puketāpapa councillor and her partner in urban crime from the Orākei Local Board worry for the city’s special character areas. But then, a surprise. The pair deliver a warning that would have been unheard of just a few years ago, when renters were clambering over each other to lease mould-ridden houses in the back blocks of Blockhouse Bay. If the government insists on making them legalise apartments near train stations, they intone, the city could end up with an oversupply of housing.”

“Fletcher and Churton aren’t the only ones cautioning about the risk of us overindulging and becoming engorged on homes. Property coach Steve Goodey has complained repeatedly to RNZ about what he sees as a growing glut of townhouses in Auckland. The situation is so severe that in some cases it’s resulting in house vendors reducing their asking prices, or even more sickeningly, landlords offering discounts to tempt tenants into their investment properties. Bank economists have also tentatively raised the spectre of us having ‘too much of a good thing.’ Real estate firms go even further, bullying our weighty and ‘bloated’ property market.”

“These concerns are notable for being what scientists would term ‘total bullshit.’ Auckland’s median house price is still just shy of $1 million. That’s 7.7 times the city’s median household income, and though that ratio has come down in recent years thanks to a classic one-two combo of a construction boom and crippling recession, it still comfortably rates as severely unaffordable on the scale set up by the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. The rest of the country isn’t faring much better, with a median multiple of 6.3. In Queenstown, that rises to 12.5, a number so high that just thinking about buying a house there will bankrupt you.”

“These are not the hallmarks of a market awash in surplus housing. New Zealand has had a malfunctioning property market for so long that the first glimmer of normality is being treated like a catastrophe. Could it be that the problem isn’t so much housing oversupply, but instead that our property-owning class is experiencing unfamiliar pangs of withdrawal after having the needle of untaxed capital gains partially removed from its arm? Is it possible that investors are screaming, not because the market has gone bung, but because tenants no longer have to sacrifice their firstborn to get a barely maintained bungalow?”

“Even if they’re right though, and we’re in the midst of a massive housing glut, what’s the problem again? Having too many houses is like having too many bowls of Kiwi onion dip. All it means is that you have a lot of delicious options to choose from at the post-funeral snack table. There could be a few downsides to that so-called oversupply. Slowing demand may cause a downturn in the construction sector. Some landlords and property speculators might lose money for pretty much the first time in our nation’s history. But for the rest of us, it means no longer exchanging a kidney for the first rental that comes along, or competing against hordes of moneyed investors at almost every auction. It means finally walking into that supermarket, finding a range of affordable beans on offer, and maybe, just maybe, even getting a decent bargain. That sounds like a good problem to have. You might even say it’s not actually a problem at all.”