The Housing Bubble Blog

A report from Boston.com in Massachusetts. "'The Boston condo market is a great example of what’s happening nationally,' said Kiernan Middleman, an agent with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Warren Residential. Buyers are simply leaving the city and heading to the suburbs.' From July through...

A report from Mortgage Broker News in Canada. "Readers will be all too familiar with the pitch from realtors who specialize in pre-construction condo sales: Put down your deposit, sit back and watch as that piece of paper appreciates faster than any completed condo unit in the city. But those days...

A report from the Herald Tribune in Florida. "The good news: foreclosure activity has fallen to historic low levels in the Sarasota-Manatee region. The bad: more local homeowners are falling behind on their mortgage payments, a troubling sign that foreclosure rates could head up in the months...

A report from the Wall Street Journal. "Signs of stress in New York City’s commercial properties are fueling investor bets that trouble in the nation’s largest real-estate market could spread pain nationwide. 'Distress in financial markets was all about residential mortgage-backed securities in...

A report from People Magazine. "San Francisco has seen a massive drop in apartment rental prices, a new report shows. Many other big cities across the country are seeing similar trends. According to Bloomberg, studio rents in Manhattan fell 15 percent to 2,495. Likewise, in Seattle, prices for a...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "The number of active listings in the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors region at the end of September was down 5.6% from a year ago, but an encouraging sign for potential buyers is that new listings rose by 30%, with more than 3,000 homes...

A report from National Mortgage Professional. "'Four months into the pandemic, the 120-day delinquency rate for July spiked to 1.4%,' said Dr. Frank Nothaft, chief economist at CoreLogic. 'This was the highest rate in more than 21 years and double the December 2009 Great Recession peak. The spike...

A report from Insauga in Canada. "With more condos being listed and prices dipping month-over-month, should condo owners in Mississauga be worried? 'Condos are selling for under-asking, but the overinflated market we had is correcting so we can have stability over the long term,' said Nik Oberoi, a...

A report from Arlington Now in Virginia. "The number of condos listed for sale in Arlington during September (261) ranks as the 2nd most in any month over the last 10+ years, trailing a record-setting April 2016 volume (268) by just seven. Our neighbors in D.C. blew past all-time highs over the...

A report from Bisnow New York. "Meridian Capital Group Senior Executive Managing Director David Schechtman noted he is working on a 'broken' condominium deal in Brooklyn upon which there is a $65M senior secured mortgage with $25M of equity behind it. 'The sponsors are so pragmatic, they are...

A report from CTV News in Canada. "Ari Newman has called Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood home for the last three years, but that’s about to change. 'It’s been an increasingly bad experience living in Strathcona,' he told CTV News. 'I’m seeing an escalation of violent crime, I’m seeing an...

A report from USA Today. "The housing market has been booming during the COVID-19 crisis, but America’s cities are taking it on the chin. Big cities like New York and San Francisco, in particular, are struggling with falling prices. 'Since the crisis began, however, Redfin is handling about 600...

A report from the Boston Globe. "Massachusetts has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, at 11.3 percent. Unemployment in the service sector is higher than in any other job category, and many of the state’s 622,000 service workers are dependent on people returning to the office in...

A report from the San Francisco Chronicle in California. "Sales tax data shows San Francisco’s population likely declined during the coronavirus pandemic, the city’s chief economist Ted Egan told The Chronicle. 'We’re the worst in the state,' he said. 'That’s a sign to me that people aren’t here.'...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Record vacancies dropped Manhattan apartment rental prices to their lowest levels in seven years as tenants continued to flee the city. The number of apartment listings tripled from a year earlier to 15,923, the most since record-keeping began in...

A report from Bloomberg on Canada. "Active listings of condos in downtown Toronto hit a record at the end of September and were 215 per cent higher than a year earlier, according to Urbanation data. 'Demand is just not keeping up with new supply right now,' said Urbanation President Shaun...

A report from Realtor.com. "Steve Mariucc is prepped to take a loss on his New York City apartment. The NFL Network analyst has put the Upper East Side condo on the market for $2,595,000. The offensive guru purchased the three-bedroom pad in 2015 for $3.2 million, so he's going to be sacked for a...

A report from AM New York. "According to RealtyHop, five Manhattan neighborhoods had the highest number of price drops last month. Manhattan’s Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill was the neighborhood with the most price drops in September. The Norwood area of the Bronx had the highest median percentage...

Two reports from the Wall Street Journal. "Even with recent gains, more jobs have been lost—nearly 11 million—than were cut in the wake of the 2007-09 recession, when 8.7 million were eliminated. Economic production, despite a sharp bounce-back in the third quarter, still resembles the depths of...

A report from the Honolulu Civil Beat. "Erina Peters, a single mom who has called Hawaii home since she was 3 years old, packed up her things and made the tough decision to relocate to Nevada in mid-February. The worsening pandemic and its ripple effect on the tourism industry, which both of her...