The Adjustment Might Result In A Full-On Crash
It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “Back in August, the seven-bed, seven-bath Russian Hill triplex at 949 Lombard, once used to film the first San Francisco season of MTV’s The Real World, popped up for sale, asking a princely but contextually appropriate $6.99 million. Four months later the price has precipitously dropped, landing at $4.89 million in the latest offer.”
“In Stouffville and Keswick, where the houses tend to be newer and there’s not much to distinguish them from competing listings, sales are slow. Cameron Forbes, general manager of ReMax Realtron Realty Inc, points to the example of one Stouffville house listed for sale for about $1-million six weeks ago. At the time, it was the only property in the area around that price level. Since then, three or four very similar houses have arrived on the market. The agent cut the price to about $880,000 but still the buyers aren’t coming to a house that would have gone for $1.1-million in the spring.”
“‘Activity dropped to zero,’ he says of the number of potential buyers who requested showings.”
“Nordea Bank AB won’t keep up with growth in Sweden’s mortgage market as the biggest Nordic lender adopts a more cautious approach, Chief Executive Officer Casper von Koskull said.Sweden’s housing market has dominated economic headlines of late amid signs a price correction is under way. Concerns that the adjustment might result in a full-on crash have hit the currency, with the krona losing more than 5 percent against the euro since the end of August.”
“Stricter mortgage rules have coincided with a big increase in supply, and with households’ finances increasingly stretched, home prices have started to fall. ‘There is a cooling taking place in the Swedish housing market, no doubt,’ von Koskull said.”
“Capital values in Dubai’s residential property market have dropped to their lowest level in four years, according to Consultancy Cluttons. Comparing current unit prices to those at the peak of the market in the third quarter of 2008, it found that Burj Khalifa apartments had fallen in value by 71.2 percent, apartments in Discovery Gardens by 38.5 percent and in Jumeirah Lakes Towers by 31.4 percent. Prices in some districts have come under pressure recently because of the number of newer, cheaper units coming onto the market, Cluttons said.”
“On a recent Sunday morning in the sun-drenched Australian city of Brisbane, about 50 ‘property tourists’ boarded a bus tour with a difference. The group – all local Aussies looking to purchase their first homes – were shuttled to five new apartment projects where brochures promised they could ‘capitalize on international deposit defaults’ and snap up properties at sharp discounts. The homes were mostly being sold by Chinese investors unable to make settlement on their investments as Beijing cracks down on money flowing out of China and restrictions on Australian banks lending to foreign investors bite, the company behind the tour said.”
“‘Getting money out of China is very hard now. That’s a big factor for these discounts,’ said Property Direct founder David Beard, who sold some two-bedroom units on the bus tour at 15-20 percent lower than list prices. ‘Property sales have fallen because of that, and it has got progressively harder to get bank loans in Australia.’”
“While the rules were often flouted in the past, doing so now has become increasingly difficult, some money transfer agents told Reuters. At the same time, under pressure from regulators to douse risky lending in the real estate sector, Australia’s biggest banks stopped loaning money to foreigners. ‘It is almost impossible to send the full (settlement) amount from mainland China,’ said Felix Su, financial adviser at foreign exchange firm KVB Kunlun.”
“The red-hot population growth rate around Denver and Northern Colorado is cooling, and those who are leaving in increasing numbers say they were driven away by rising housing prices, jobs that don’t pay enough and traffic jams. ‘It’s kind of ironic because the reasons why I’m leaving Colorado are the same reasons why I left New Jersey — too much traffic, not making enough money and angry people,’ said Nicole Parkin. ‘The growth of our beautiful city has brought nothing but increased traffic, angry entitled transplants who have no respect, and a cost of living that is through the roof.’”
“Because the recession hit New Jersey homeowners particularly hard, the Garden State faces an abundance of short sale homes — homes that sell for less than the amount that the current owner owes on their mortgage. ‘We do have more inventory than Philadelphia,’ said Patricia Rohan, a broker at Weichert Realtors in Burlington County. ‘But the number of short sales on the market is probably throwing the number off. They sit longer on the market than regular homes that are not distressed. The short sales need permission from the bank to sell,’ Rohan said, so there is more ‘red tape.’ As a result, she said, some buyers will stay away — meaning the houses will linger.”
