The Housing Bubble Blog

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "The Commerce Department said on Friday new home sales dropped 12.8% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 635,000 units last month. It was the biggest monthly decline since July 2013. The median new house price was $312,800, down 4.5% from a year...

A report from Realtor.com on Florida. "Rap mogul Bryan 'Birdman' Williams hasn’t been able to find a buyer for his swanky manse in Miami Beach, Florida. To entice someone (anyone!) into making an offer, the price on Birdman’s enormous tricked-out mansion was recently slashed to $13.5 million. The...

A report from Bloomberg. "Last month, a risky, new deal hit the municipal-bond market. It came from a small borrower in Colorado that was looking to finance the construction of 1,200 luxury homes in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It was an odd time for such a project. Denver’s decade-long...

A report from the Wall Street Journal. "More than a decade after home loans triggered the worst financial crisis in a generation, the strict lending requirements put in place during its aftermath are starting to erode. Home buyers with low credit scores or high debt levels as well as those lacking...

A report from Curbed San Francisco in California. "Earlier this month, UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and law firm Allen Matkins released their survey of California developers and found that those with a stake in building housing are feeling gun shy about the Bay Area. 'In the last six...

A report from Business in Vancouver in Canada. "Metro Vancouver’s sluggish residential real estate market has caused some developers to pull the plug on projects. 'The market is totally in the dumps right now,' said Holborn Group of Cos. CEO Joo Kim Tiah. 'I don’t think people are aware or have a...

A report from Bloomberg on New York. "Apartments in Manhattan’s Financial District aren’t exactly trading like blue chips on the nearby New York Stock Exchange. After a spurt of construction aimed at foreign buyers, whose numbers are dwindling, and finance workers, who have seen many of their jobs...

A report from the Daily Independent in Kentucky. "The Ashland area real estate market continues to demonstrate significant strength despite coming off a record year for home sales in 2018. Veteran real estate agent Cindy Conley-Jones said sales are hot in Boyd County in part because of USDA loan...

A report from KTVU in California. "Donald Kilmer and his wife are in the process of selling their 4-bedroom home in the Cambrian area of San Jose and moving to Idaho. But prices have dropped. According to Redfin, the San Jose market has seen the second biggest drop in median sale price nationwide...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Look around Phoenix and you see cranes and construction sites, new buildings everywhere. New home construction in Phoenix largely came to a halt during the recession, but land speculation continued. 'In the early 2000s, a property would be priced at...

A report from the Buffalo News in New York. "When Brett Barrett's husband got a surgical residency in Buffalo, the couple left Chicago for the Colvin Estates neighborhood of North Buffalo. They closed in May on their new $369,000 Marrano home and moved in about a month later, confident they...

A report from the Globe and Mail in Canada. "Vancouver has come in dead last in the latest global ranking of luxury real estate by consultants Knight Frank. Vancouver luxury prices slipped 13.6 per cent in the quarter from a year earlier. At the bottom, just above Vancouver, were Istanbul, where...

A report from CNBC. "Homebuilders and buyers alike are pulling back, even as mortgage rates fall to multiyear lows. Just 12% of adults said they plan to buy a home in the next year, according to the National Association of Home Builders. That is down from 14% in 2018. 'The drop marks the third...

A report from the World Property Journal. "Seattle, Washington, D.C., Honolulu and San Jose--some of the most expensive real estate markets in the U.S.--are among the cities where luxury home prices have dropped the most. In Seattle, home prices for the top 5 percent of the market declined 14.4...

A report from the Lethbridge Herald in Canada. "Lethbridge Land released its annual report earlier this week, and the picture it paints of the city’s current home-building slowdown couldn’t be more clear. 'Over the past two years the amount of building permits has slowed down quite a bit,'...

A report from the Bay Area Newsgroup in California. "Foreign buyers have cooled on the U.S. residential home market, dropping investments by more than one-third over the previous year and spending less in expensive California. About one-third of foreign purchases in California during a recent...

A report from the Herald Tribune in Florida. "More Southwest Florida homeowners are struggling to pay their mortgages. The number of residential properties with a foreclosure filing rose 23% as of mid-year in the Sarasota-Manatee region, according to ATTOM Data Solutions. The local increase was not...

A report from the Berkshire Eagle in Massachusetts. "Single- and multifamily home sales showed modest gains over the first half of the year, according to the Berkshire Realtors. South county has a glut of homes for sale in the $1 million-plus range — 19 percent of homes for sale in the southern...

A report from Globe St. "As the cycle continues to mature, apartment developers are seeing more opportunities for ground-up apartment construction in semi-urban or urban-core-adjacent neighborhoods and mid-rise construction. Some capital sources have been concerned about overbuilding in urban core...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Home prices slipped in some of the costliest U.S. markets in the second quarter. Prices slid 5.3% in the San Jose region. Prices slipped 1.9% in the San Francisco area and 1.2% in urban Honolulu. 'Housing unaffordability will hinder sales...