Real Estate
New York City unveils plan to encourage the (extremely costly) conversion of vacant offices into residential housing (from Bloomberg on August 17)…
New York City is rolling out a plan to convert vacant offices into as many as 20,000 new housing units by creating a multi-agency group to help developers cut through red tape and rezoning a section of Manhattan known as Midtown South. The moves come after Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul’s quest for
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is bullish on homebuilders (from The Wall Street Journal on August 14)…
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway made a fresh bet on U.S. homebuilders in the second quarter. The company unveiled new positions in D.R. Horton, NVR, and Lennar, together worth more than $800 million at the end of June. The changes in Berkshire’s stock portfolio were disclosed after the market closed Monday, when the company released its
The lack of existing home supply is creating a boom in the new-home market (from The Wall Street Journal on July 19)…
After mortgage rates shot up last year, Ivory Homes, one of Utah’s largest builders, suddenly had few buyers for the hundreds of homes it had under construction. So Clark Ivory, the chief executive, laid off 9% of his staff, and by January he had slashed construction by nearly 80% from its 2022 peak. Then, much
The value of distressed U.S. office properties rose 36% to $24.8 billion in the second quarter (from Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance on July 19)…
About $24.8 billion of US office buildings were in distress at the end of the second quarter, surpassing previous leading commercial real estate laggards — hotels and retail properties. The total value of offices that were financially troubled or already repossessed by lenders shot up about 36% from the first quarter, MSCI Real Assets reported
An insider’s look at the carnage in New York’s office real estate market (from New York Magazine on July 18)…
Every time the real-estate market crashes, people say, “This time is different.” When there’s distress all around, it’s hard to grasp how there could ever be an upside. But with the benefit of hindsight, you can see that if you’d had enough money when things got bad, you could have made a killing by taking
U.S. homebuilder sentiment continues to improve as supplies remain tight (from Bloomberg on July 18)…
US homebuilder sentiment rose in July to the highest level in 13 months as buyers continued to opt for new construction amid a tight housing supply. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo gauge increased for a seventh-straight month, to 56 from 55 in June. The figure matched the median estimate in a Bloomberg survey
This simple statistic explains why U.S. housing supply remains stubbornly low (from MarketWatch via Realtor.com on July 17)…
Mortgage rates are inches away from 7% – but less than a tenth of U.S. homeowners have a home loan at that rate. In fact, only 9% of all existing mortgages in the U.S. were taken out with a rate of above 6%, according to data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and analyzed by
Unlike CRE prices, U.S. home prices are closing in on a new all-time high (from Redfin on July 17)…
A record low number of homes for sale combined with an uptick in homebuyer demand propped up housing prices in June, even as elevated mortgage rates kept many buyers on the sidelines. The median U.S. home sale price was $426,056 in June, just 1.5% ($6,341) below the all-time high of $432,397 set in May 2022.