The Housing Bubble Blog

A report from Reuters on Canada. "Home sales in Toronto fell 22 percent in January from a year earlier as rising interest rates and tighter mortgage rules weighed on demand. The average price of Toronto homes was C$736,783 ($589,002) in January, little changed from C$735,088 in December, and 19.8...

A report from BizWest. "Two things struck me at the recent Northern Colorado Economic Forecast, presented by BizWest: Uniform praise for the economy overall, with strong growth in banking, health care, real estate, etc. Strength is apparent both at the national and local levels, as federal tax...

A report from the News Press in Florida. "The national market is hot, the local residential market is not. Millennials are starting to drive the market. And commercial real estate is behaving strangely. Those are some of the topics coming to The News-Press Market Watch 2018: Focus on Real Estate on...

A report from Mingtiandi on California. "China’s Greenland Group is reportedly shopping the hotel within its flagship mixed-use project on the US west coast only 10 months after it opened, in the latest sign of overseas strains for the state-owned property firm. Oversupply fears could be a factor...

A weekend topic starting with Reuters. "A decade on from the financial crisis, global monetary policy is finally tightening, with the Federal Reserve raising U.S. interest rates and other central banks gradually turning off the stimulus taps. But despite the 'normalisation' underway, there’s a...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Housing prices in the Flagstaff area continued to climb in 2017, sticking with a five-year trend of increasing median home sales prices. Realtor Stephen Brighton said Flagstaff is 'basically at the top' of the housing market again, noting the median...

A report from Bloomberg on New York. "Equity Residential has a New York story, and it doesn’t have a happy ending -- at least, not yet. The metro area, where developers are churning out thousands of new rentals, and tenants have the luxury to bargain, was the only one that showed a decline in rent...

A report from Bloomberg on Canada. "The only thing that might be colder than Toronto in January is the city’s housing market. While the bleak mid-winter is never the best time to sell a home in Canada, a string of open houses in the country’s largest city were chillingly empty on a recent Saturday...

A report from the Daily Evergreen in Washington. "I’ll admit I’m extremely skeptical when it comes to housing prices in Washington. There are a few apartments I saw while browsing Craigslist that blew my mind. $1,365 for a top floor unit at the Armory Apartments? DABCO’s downtown luxury lofts? To...

A report from Gatehouse News in Massachusetts. "The low inventory of homes for sale across the Cape and Islands that has pervaded the market in the last 12 months continues to baffle even the most experienced real estate agents, who’ve seen their share of unusual cycles over the decades. 'There’s...

A weekend topic on Canada and Australia starting with ThinkPol. "British Columbians want the government to go after money launderers, tax evaders, speculators and other fraudsters operating in the province’s real estate market, public responses to the governing NDP’s 2018 budget consultation show....

A report from the Seattle Times in Washington. "Seattle’s sky-high crane count has dropped significantly for the first time in years, suggesting the ongoing construction boom could be starting to lose some steam — even as the city continues to lead the country in total cranes. Most of the new...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "This week, 10 years ago, Americans learned that the U.S. had its largest single-year drop in home prices in a quarter century. It began, in many ways, in people's heads. That is, after all, where hopes ultimately reside. The belief that housing...

A report from MarketWatch. "'It is 2005 all over again in terms of the valuation extreme, the psychological excess and the denial.' That’s what James Stack, who accurately predicted the last housing crash, told Bloomberg about what he’s seeing with home prices these days. Stack explained that his...

A report from CBC News in Canada. "Planned homes in a new Whitby subdivision are on sale for up to $90,000 less than similar homes in the same development were a year ago. Good news if you're house hunting now. Bad news if you bought into the development a year ago. Last January, Astrid Poei and...

A report from Bloomberg on California. "Landlords counting on downtown Los Angeles as a cash machine may be in for the same bout of pain as their counterparts in Manhattan, where a flood of supply has started to drive down rents. More than 4,000 new apartments are forecast to hit the Los Angeles...

A report from CNBC. "December's steep drop in single-family housing starts is not indicative of what is really going on at construction sites across the nation. There is optimism among homebuilders and a sharp rise in demand from homebuyers. Builders are now starting to build more speculative homes...

A weekend topic starting with the Khaleej Times. "There is a litany of research surrounding the formation of an asset bubble on how and if even possible to identify them. In the real estate market, the largest crash in recent times was during the World Financial Crisis (WFC) of 2008. A closer look...

A weekend topic starting with Pork Business. "The coming year is pivotal for agriculture because we will find out if we have entered a stabilization zone or if we begin another leg down, says Terry Barr, senior director, CoBank. Barr, along with fellow ag economist David Kohl, highlighted key...

It's Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. "Realtor.com named Las Vegas the number one real estate market in the country for 2018. Home prices are rising, but does that mean we're heading toward another housing bubble? Realtors like Tim Kelly Kiernan believe the market tends to go up and down...