Free Republic

S&P Global Ratings announced yesterday that it was changing its outlook on San Francisco's debt from stable to negative.The outlook on the city-county’s outstanding general obligation and appropriation debt was cut to negative from stable this week by the ratings company. The weakness in the city’s commercial real estate market and tourism activity were factors that drove the move, S&P said. Adding to the city’s burdens, San Francisco’s budget expenditures outpaced revenue growth in fiscal 2023.To be clear, the ratings agency hasn't downgraded the city's credit rating, which is still at "AAA," the highest possible. A downgrade in the credit...

The already insane cost of purchasing a home has hit a new high, thanks to the ongoing horror show that is Bidenomics. Fox News: Findings from Redfin show the combination of steep mortgage rates and elevated home prices has pushed the median monthly housing payment to a record $2,775 – an 11% increase from the same time last year. … There are a number of driving forces behind the affordability crisis. Years of underbuilding fueled a shortage of homes in the country, a problem that was later exacerbated by the rapid rise in mortgage rates and expensive construction materials. And...

Home sales saw their biggest month-on-month decline since November 2022 in March, dropping by 4.3 percent compared to February. Meanwhile, the average 30-year fixed mortgage surged to 7.1 percent — its highest since the end of last year. Average monthly new mortgage payments are 38 percent higher than average apartment rent, with this double-digit disparity persisting for a two-year period. This is discouraging Americans from buying their own homes, with sales down 3.7 percent year-on-year.

Among the many hard truths for those trying to enter America's brutal housing market, here's one: Baby boomers continue to own many of the country's large houses, even after their households have shrunk to one or two people. Baby boomer empty nesters own twice as many of the country's three-bedroom-or-larger homes, compared with millennials with kids, according to a recent analysis from Redfin. That means those larger homes aren't hitting the market, one factor limiting the supply for the younger generations who could use those extra bedrooms. Some baby boomers, the generation now between the ages of 60 and 78,...

Meredith Whitney, deemed the “Oracle of Wall Street” for successfully calling the financial crisis, says home prices are likely to fall substantially, and the reasons have to do with habits picked up by young guys. “You have men staying single longer…and then you have what I call a growing crisis of the young American male…they’re twice as likely to live at home than women. So one out of five young men live at home with their parents, and these aren’t young men going to college and coming home for holiday breaks, these are young, grown men choosing to live at...

The number of cities where the typical home price is at least $1 million has dramatically increased over the past year. There are now 550 U.S. cities where an average home is worth $1 million or more, according to a new analysis from Zillow. The lack of available homes for sale is keeping prices elevated and pushing values even higher. Even as sales inventory has begun to tick up this spring, a typical home in the U.S. is currently worth 4.2% more than it was last year. Homes in million-dollar cities saw values grow 4.6%. Zillow anticipates interest rate decreases...

You’ve probably heard of the “Not In My Backyard” — or NIMBY — movement, but you might not be familiar with “Yes In My Backyard,” an approach that embraces affordable housing development in every community. We face a national housing crisis, and Americans cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the needs of our neighbors, ignore the problem or hope someone else will solve it. We need more YIMBYs. As chair of the New Democrat Coalition’s Affordable Housing Task Force, I’m proud to lead our group of YIMBY Democrats in the House, and unveil the New Dems’ comprehensive Housing...

The Meltdown of Commercial Real EstateIn case you’ve still got money in a bank, Bloomberg is warning that defaults in commercial real estate loans could “topple” hundreds of US banks.Leaving taxpayers on the hook for trillions in losses.The note, by Senior Editor James Crombie, walks us through the festering hellscape that is commercial real estate.To set the mood, a new study predicts that nearly half of downtown Pittsburgh office space could be vacant in 4 years. Major cities like San Francisco are already sporting zombie-apocalypse downtowns, with abandoned office buildings baking in the sun.So what happened? The Fed’s yo-yo interest...

Across the country, deals are starting to pick up, revealing just how far real estate prices have fallen. That’s spurring widespread concern about losses that can ripple across the global financial system — as underscored by the recent turmoil unleashed by New York Community Bancorp, Japan’s Aozora Bank and Germany’s Deutsche Pfandbriefbank as they took steps to brace for bad loans. In Manhattan, brokers have started to market debt backed by a Blackstone-owned office building at a roughly 50% discount. A prime office tower in Los Angeles sold in December for about 45% less than its purchase price a decade...

“It’s too easy to forge a deed and record it,” Real estate attorney Richard Alembik told WSB-TV. “It’s a big problem nowadays, because of the fact that e-filing, the e-recording of deeds is so easy. It’s very easy to record forged deeds.” Alembik said notaries don’t check the identification of the people who submit the documents to verify if they are the rightful homeowners. Victims of fraud who have proof to be the rightful homeowners can still be ordered by a judge to move out and pay fines, according to the outlet. An elderly Georgia homeowner was forced out of...

Landlords are now beating squatters at their own game. They are learning how to turn the tables by squatting on the squatters. This concept of invading the homes of the squatters was made very public by Mr. Flash Shelton: He became a national inspiration to landlords when he employed bold strategies to evict a mother-daughter grifter team from his mother’s family home. The dramatic event was recorded by Mr. Shelton and uploaded on YouTube. His amateur production of outwitting the mother-daughter grifter team offered a glimpse of what could be accomplished when the injured party (i.e. landlord) refuses to be...

The way people buy and sell homes in the U.S. may be about to change, following a landmark settlement proposed by the nation’s top real-estate-industry group. But that may not make things easy for home buyers, one mortgage-company CEO says. The settlement proposed by the National Association of Realtors, which will go into effect in mid-July if it’s approved, would require that listings on the NAR-run Multiple Listing Service — a database of homes for sale — no longer have a field showing how much buyer’s agents will earn in commissions on the sale. In other words, buyer’s agents won’t...

The legal homeowner recently had been arrested for unlawful eviction after trying to remove the squatters Two of the three squatters who allegedly took over a woman’s $1 million home in New York City fled the property after recently having a tense stand-off with the property’s owner and facing "vigilantes" who tried to evict the illegal tenants, a new report details. Adele Andaloro, 47, said her property in Flushing, Queens, had been taken over by a group of squatters while the woman tried to sell the property last month. The home had been owned by Andaloro’s parents, who had left...

A TikTok influencer is advising illegal immigrants on how to 'invade' American homes and invoke squatter's rights, making it difficult for them to be removed from properties. Leonel Moreno, who goes by @leitooficial_25 online and appears to be a Venezuelan migrant, has told undocumented immigrants that under US law, 'if a house is not inhabited, we can seize it'. He is referring to squatter's rights, or adverse possession laws - a common law principle that allows an illegal inhabitant to acquire ownership of a property based on continuous occupation without the legal owner's consent. Moreno, alleging he has friends who...

One of the most important ideas in the Bill of Rights is that your private property belongs to you. It wasn’t exactly a novel concept, but just in case there was any doubt, the Bill of Rights spelled it out: No one can seize your property without due process. And if you take a look at the major court cases in this area over the years, you’ll find that you have the strongest privacy interests in your home, which makes sense. There are all kinds of exceptions that police can use to search your car, or your locker at work,...

The woes for the mortgage market continue under President Magoo. Mortgage applications decreased 1.6 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending March 15, 2024. The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, decreased 1.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index decreased 1 percent compared with the previous week. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index decreased 1 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index decreased 1 percent compared with the previous week...

Since its founding nearly two decades ago, Zillow has revolutionized the way Americans buy, rent, sell — and fantasize — about housing in the US. But a settlement that breaks the grip of powerful real estate agents could trigger a range of problems for the platform already suffering from declining traffic in an increasingly competitive housing market. The company’s stock has dropped nearly 13% since Friday’s $418 million settlement between the National Association of Realtors and groups of home sellers which ended the standard 6% commission for Realtors. It’s a sign that investors fear the settlement could have seismic effects...

How bad is Bidenomics for the American middle class? We know that inflation is far higher under China/Ukraine Joe (even with those awful looking Hoka shoes), but the pain that is being felt is attrocious. Nike has made a pair of shoes fitting Biden’s international image.

San Francisco city officials plan to pull its offices from a downtown building near City Hall due to high rent and a bad real estate market, The San Francisco Standard reported Friday. The 11-story building in downtown San Francisco was initially leased to city and county officials back in 1999 and has over the years served as office space for many municipal departments like the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Office of the Treasurer & Tax Collector, the Mayor’s Office of Disability and the Department of the Environment, the outlet reported.

The powerful National Association of Realtors last week agreed to settle a big lawsuit and change the way real estate agents get paid — from a standard commission to something truly negotiable. Why it matters: The deal could open up a tightly controlled market to genuine competition, and create opportunities for new players and business models in a relatively old-fashioned world. It could do for real estate what the internet did for stock trading — bring down broker fees. The impact: That'll likely mean lower costs for sellers, who brought the lawsuit as a class action. The impact on buyers...