The Housing Bubble Blog

A report from the Philadelphia Inquirer in Pennsylvania. "When Toll Brothers cofounder Bruce E. Toll paid $23.5 million for a 552-bed student housing complex near Kutztown University eight years ago, record-smashing enrollment at the Berks County college was translating into huge demand for rooms."...

A weekend topic starting with Market Watch. "The Federal Reserve is currently reviewing its monetary-policy strategy, tools and communications practices, to determine how best to achieve its congressional mandate of maximum employment and stable prices. The raw material is money. Sometimes it...

A report from the Globe and Mail in Canada. "Dirty money is not a problem contained to casinos and the luxury car trade. It involves billions of dollars tumbling through the real estate market - an estimated $5-billion just in the real estate sector last year." "Bill McCarthy, a Burnaby-based real...

A report from the Review Journal in Nevada. "Homebuilders’ sales totals dipped throughout Southern Nevada early this year. But according to a report this week, buyer activity fell particularly hard in a normally hot spot for house construction: Summerlin. Builders sold 302 homes in Las Vegas’...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "High-end home prices got kicked out of the penthouse in early 2019, falling for the first time in nearly three years, according to Redfin. In Boston, the average luxury home sold for $3,219,000, down 22.4 percent from the first quarter of 2018....

A report from the Express News in Texas. "Terravista Corp. partnerships that own four San Antonio apartment complexes totaling 652 units sought bankruptcy protection this week to stop foreclosure proceedings by a lender. A Terravista official blamed a dispute with the partnerships’ lender for the...

A report from Bloomberg. "A decade ago, Angelo Mozilo was the face of the housing bust that preceded the financial crisis. Now the former chief executive officer of Countrywide Financial Corp. is predicting another drop, and for some homeowners it may be even worse. High-end properties in coastal...

A report from Bloomberg. "Sean Pan wanted to be rich, and his day job as an aeronautical engineer wasn’t cutting it. So at 27 he started a side gig flipping houses in the booming San Francisco Bay Area. He was hooked after making $300,000 on his first deal. That was two years ago. Now home sales...

A report from ABC News in Australia."A new crackdown on property lending has emerged in the wake of the Banking Royal Commission, with borrowers now being asked for deposits of up to 30 per cent and banks throwing greater scrutiny on location and living expenses when assessing loans." "In addition,...

A report from Patch New York City. "Prices dropped on some 212 homes in the Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill area last month, the most for any neighborhood in the city, according to a report from RealtyHop. One home in the neighborhood at 834 Fifth Ave. saw $9 million come off its price, the biggest...

A report from the Review Journal in Nevada. "Las Vegas house prices last month rose at their slowest pace in seven years — another sign of the market’s continued downshift, a new report shows. Amber Diskin, an agent with iProperties International, said a lot of sellers were overpricing their homes,...

A report from Bloomberg on Canada. "The housing numbers out of Vancouver, once among the world’s hottest real estate markets, are getting more dismal with each passing month. With Canada’s rising household debt levels 'perilously high,' more needs to be done to lift incomes that have stagnated for...

A report from the Seattle Times in Washington. "Seattle-area homebuyers have a bit of good news as the middle of the housing market continues to come down from what one local housing economist calls last summer’s 'sugar high.' April’s median price of a single-family home in King County dipped to...

A report from the Daily Mail on the UK. "As Rod Stewart might have sung, the price cut is the deepest. But it seems to have had the desired effect. The singer has sold his Essex mansion. But Sir Rod was forced to slash the original £7.5million asking price by almost half to shift the property,...

A report from Kieth Jurow. "California was the epicenter of cash-out refinancing and HELOC madness during the wild bubble years. There is growing evidence that Californians have learned nothing from the collapse and are once again throwing caution to the wind. According to a leading mortgage broker...

A report from Geek Wire on Washington. "Loftium, the Seattle real estate startup that helped people buy homes in exchange for renting out an extra room on Airbnb, has shifted its focus to rentals. 'Given how quickly home prices have risen, we realized that a large portion of our customer base were...

A weekend topic starting with Kenneth R. Harney. "According to the Urban Institute Housing Finance Policy Center's latest quarterly credit availability report, mortgage lenders are reaching out to borrowers who might have been marginal — or rejectees — in the past. The institute's study suggests...

A report from Glacier Media in Canada. "Since May 1, 2018, only 43 detached homes in the Metro Vancouver region – stretching from Mission and Delta to the Sunshine Coast and Whistler – have sold above $7 million. All 43 of those houses sold for below asking, averaging a discount of 16 per cent off...

A report from Palo Alto Weekly in California. "The Year of the Pig had a very slow start in our local real estate market. So far, we haven't experienced anything remotely similar to the usual spring frenzy. Among the 148 new listings so far this year, especially at the very beginning of the year,...

A report from the Commercial Observer in New York. "Asking and taking rents at Manhattan’s high street retail districts continue to drop. 'It’s a little bit bloody out there,' said Jared Epstein, a principal at Aurora Capital Associates." The New York Daily Record. "The mortgage holder on Monarch...