• As sales jump by 50%, Singaporeans dominate the buying
• Stringent stamp duties discourage more purchases by foreigners

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After years of declines, Singapore’s home sales are on a roll, even as purchases by foreign buyers have remained muted.

Stringent stamp duties levied by the government have had the intended effect of damping speculative foreign demand, with foreign buyers accounting for just 6 percent of purchases in the first half, data from Cushman & Wakefield show. That compares with 9 percent as recently as 2013, when mortgage rules were tightened.

Prices for construction labor and materials are soaring.

Last year, Jim Brown and other home builders around Atlanta could get a good framing crew at a rate of $3.25 per square foot. This year, the few framers they can find demand, and get, almost double that.

“They can ask anything,” Brown said. “There aren’t enough of them left.”

• More Americans say home-buying conditions bad because of price
• Despite low rates, higher asking prices cut into affordability

Signs are mounting that rising home values are starting to close the door for more Americans, threatening to temper the momentum in residential real estate.

Purchases of previously owned houses unexpectedly fell in July to an 11-month low and sales of new homes were the weakest this year, reports showed this week. While the median time on the market for existing properties was 30 days in July compared with 36 days a year ago, indicating resilient demand, the number of listings remains lean and problematic…

F. Scott Fitzgerald placed his hero in this home in The Great Gatsby. Now it’s being sold by James Mai, a financial whiz made immortal in The Big Short for having foreseen the 2008 financial crisis.

No matter how much money you have, you can’t buy your way into the Great American Novel. For that, you need talent and persistence—and maybe some savings to keep afloat before you hit the bestseller lists.

But if you have $16.88 million lying around, you can buy the inspiration for one of the greatest of Great American Novels—because the Long Island house that helped shape The Great Gatsby is up for sale…

Homes are trading briskly in Colorado Springs and Chicago.

Which are the busiest U.S. housing markets?

According to a new report, the most active metropolitan areas include Chicago, where an inventory logjam appears to be loosening. Also, Colorado Springs, Washington, D.C., and Reno, Nevada, near Tesla’s massive battery factory, which is attracting workers and driving housing demand. The least active metros are San Francisco, where the median home value has topped $1 million, and Rochester, N.Y., where a typical home is worth $177,000…

Where U.S. Homebuyers Are Headed Next

• McKay says Toronto may mimic Vancouver with rebound from slump
• New housing measures would ensure healthy market balance

More measures to cool the housing market may be needed if Toronto sees a bounce-back in prices as Vancouver did even after a foreign-buyers tax was imposed, according to Royal Bank of Canada Chief Executive Officer Dave McKay.

McKay said in a conference call discussing RBC’s third-quarter results that he’s already seeing a slowdown in home prices in Toronto after the Ontario government announced a 15 percent tax on foreign buyers in April. Ontario’s move followed similar measures enacted in British Columbia in August to cool an overheated Vancouver housing market…

• Toll says 23% of its sales this year were to younger buyers
• Builder aiming for the ‘more-affluent edge,’ CEO Yearley says

Millennials in the U.S. were so slow to become homeowners that it was beginning to look like they’d rent forever. Now they’re a force in the market for new high-end houses.

Toll Brothers Inc., the largest U.S. luxury-home builder, said Tuesday that 23 percent of its sales this year were to customers with at least one buyer age 35 or younger. That was a surprise, given that the company’s average contract price in the three months through July was $837,300…

• Sales bounce back after cash ban last year triggered slump
• Across 8 major cities, sales climbed 6% from previous quarter

India’s home sales are staging a recovery from a slump last year, when the government suddenly canceled most of the nation’s currency to crack down on the shadow economy.

Sales in Mumbai, the nation’s financial capital, jumped to the highest in seven years in the second quarter, according to property consultancy Liases Foras Real Estate Rating & Research Pvt. Across eight major cities, sales gained 6 percent from the previous quarter…

• Survey shows tax changes for landlords also weighing on prices
• Market to remain subdued until clarity on Brexit is given

Economists have bad news and good news for London’s home sellers: prices will probably be stuck in neutral for some years, courtesy of Brexit and a shaky economy, but a serious crash still looks unlikely.

Ten out of 14 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News cited political and economic uncertainty as a reason prices are stalling while seven said tax changes for landlords were at fault. Only six attributed the slowdown to affordability issues in a market where prices have almost doubled since 2009…

A decline in U.S. purchases of new homes in July may be a sign the industry took a breather following an even stronger run of sales than previously reported, according to government data Wednesday.

Key Takeaways

The slowdown as the second half got under way may reflect lack of affordability and low inventory, which have been constraints, especially for younger, first-time buyers who find it harder to get housing-related credit…

• Jones Lang LaSalle has listing for the hotel on Central Park
• Ashkenazy purchased a minority stake in famed property

Sahara India Pariwar, the majority owner of New York’s Plaza Hotel, is renewing efforts to find a buyer for the chateau-like property on Central Park following the recent sale of a minority stake in the building.

Sahara, based in Lucknow, India, has hired brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. to handle the sales process. “We do have the listing for the Plaza,” said Jeff Davis, international director at JLL, who heads the New York office of the firm’s hotels and hospitality group…

• Homes in many cities are now overvalued, the government says
• More powers have been given to regulator on lending policies

Grit Hildebrandt finally found her dream house near the German city of Rostock two years ago, paying more than 10 percent over the asking price to beat the other bidders. She’s now glad she’s on the other side in the country’s red-hot housing market.

“When you really like a place and there are so few others available, you just have to bite the bullet,” the 38-year-old banker said by phone. “It’s an absolute seller’s market, and they know it.”

Home prices in the U.S. increased 6.6 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier as buyers competed for a shrinking supply of listings.

Prices rose 1.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from the previous three months, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said in a statement Tuesday. In June, prices climbed 0.1 percent from May, less than the 0.5 percent average estimate of 12 economists…

Home Prices in U.S. Rose 6.6% in the Second Quarter, FHFA Says

• Toll says 23% of its sales this year were to younger buyers
• Builder aiming for the ‘more-affluent edge,’ CEO Yearley says

Millennials in the U.S. were so slow to become homeowners that it was beginning to look like they’d rent forever. Now they’re a force in the market for new high-end houses.

Toll Brothers Inc., the largest U.S. luxury-home builder, said Tuesday that 23 percent of its sales this year were to customers with at least one buyer age 35 or younger. That was a surprise, given that the company’s average contract price in the three months through July was $837,300…

• Silver tsunami will double the population of 80-somethings
• People needing memory care an under-served cohort in borough

Manhattan is about to become a testing ground for what could be the next luxury real estate boom. Well, maybe mini-boom, considering the rather narrow target group: frail urban seniors with fat bank accounts.

Developers are spending hundreds of millions on high-end assisted-living apartment projects, one on the Upper East Side and one in Midtown, and aiming for more in the area and across the U.S. The bet is that there are sufficient numbers of the affluent and aging in big cities who won’t want to leave their neighborhoods, even as they suffer cognitive decline…

Signs curbs on China’s property market are starting to bite may be a red flag for the country’s resilient steel sector.

The number of Chinese cities that saw gains in new-home prices last month contracted, data Friday showed, joining with last week’s weaker construction and home sales figures to paint a picture of a market in retreat. Prices in the southern tech hub Shenzhen fell 0.2 percent with those in Tianjin, while third-tier cities saw the steepest declines as restrictions on house purchases spread across the country.

Steel demand is heavily reliant on a lively property sector, with Shanghai-listed futures on reinforced steel, or rebar, beginning their current bull run after China’s real estate market bottomed out in late-2015…

• Annual growth of 1.6 percent in August well below 2014 high
• Hackney homeowners do best as Hammersmith and Fulham slumps

London property sellers are reining in their expectations as demand for homes continues to ease and the slowdown across the market shows few signs of letting up.

Asking prices in the city rose 1.6 percent in August over the past year, Rightmove Plc said on Monday. While that’s up from the July pace, it’s well below a 2014 peak above 20 percent and only the second time this year the annual rate of increase has topped 1 percent. On the month, prices fell 1.9 percent amid a traditional summer lull…

• Ohio city overtakes Las Vegas for top spot in survey
• Ranking is for homes with loans 25% or more higher than value

The Las Vegas metropolitan area, which led the nation with the biggest share of seriously underwater homes after the housing crash, has been overtaken by Cleveland.

The share of homeowners in the Nevada city whose loans are higher than the property’s market value by 25 percent or more fell to 20 percent in the second quarter from 55 percent four years earlier, according to figures released Thursday by ATTOM Data Solutions. Cleveland’s share was 22 percent, down from 39 percent in the second quarter of 2013, when the research company began tracking the data…

U.S. housing starts stumbled in July on an abrupt slowdown in apartment construction and a modest decline in single-family homebuilding that shows the industry will do little to spur the economy, Commerce Department data showed Wednesday.

• Sales in biggest city still falling after government measures
• But economists see evidence the worst declines may be over

Canada’s benchmark home price fell by the most in nearly a decade last month as Toronto led a fourth straight decline in sales.

The nationwide benchmark home price declined 1.5 percent to C$607,100 ($476,000) from June, the Canadian Real Estate Association said Tuesday, the largest drop since the previous recession. In Toronto, the country’s largest city, the price fell 4.7 percent on the month.

Sentiment among American homebuilders unexpectedly increased to a three-month high as builders saw greater prospects for industry demand despite elevated material costs and shortages of labor and lots, according to data Tuesday from the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo.

• China home sales rose at slowest pace in more than two years
• Cooling housing market dents demand from cement to furniture

China’s economy hit a mid-year speed bump last month as factory output, investment and consumption slowed.

While there were multiple reasons — from a deleveraging push to capacity cuts to the simple fact that the heady pace of first-half expansion was always likely to prove unsustainable — one key cause of the weakness was a pullback in property…

China’s Property Slowdown Means Peak of Growth Cycle Has Passed

• Household formation lagged home construction, census data show
• City has seen one of biggest drops in share of young families

When it comes to Toronto’s runaway housing prices, the most important question remains the extent to which speculation is driving demand.

Ideally, fundamentals such as demographics and employment are at play, and the price gains reflect natural household growth getting ahead of supply. If that’s true, the market should eventually stabilize once new supply kicks in.

A situation where speculators are bidding up prices would be much more problematic…

Toronto Has More Housing Than You Thought

• Analysts, investors favor Singapore firms as market perks up
• Hong Kong property market poses risks after record climb

Hong Kong’s property stocks are cheaper than Singapore’s, although not cheap enough to account for the risk that the world’s least affordable city could have a housing crash.

That’s according to analysts and money managers from Nomura Holdings Inc. to Janus Henderson Group Plc. In Singapore, some are seeing signs of a market bottom after years of home price declines. Hong Kong, where any let-up in government cooling measures looks unlikely in the short-term, may be teetering on the edge of a slump, with Morgan Stanley among those seeing a risk of multiyear declines…

The world’s priciest housing market got even more expensive in the second quarter.

Hong Kong’s housing affordability ratio, which measures the proportion of income spent on mortgages, worsened to about 67 percent for the quarter, the government said Friday, up from 56 percent in the year-earlier period…

The World’s Most Expensive Housing Market Just Got Even Pricier

• New home prices in west coast city up 5 percent in 2nd quarter
• Rebound highlights difficulty in engineering soft landing

Just as Toronto’s housing market is beginning to slow down, Vancouver’s is roaring back to life.

New home prices in Canada’s most-expensive market jumped 1.5 percent in June, and have gained 5 percent since March, data released Thursday by Statistics Canada show. That’s the biggest three-month increase since 1990. Prices for existing homes are also on fire, gaining 11 percent in the five months through July, according to data released this month by Vancouver’s real estate board…

• Landlords consolidate to gain scale in still-new asset class
• Invitation Homes, Starwood Waypoint to own 82,000 U.S. houses

It was a simple phone call between two real estate billionaires that led to the formation of a behemoth in the house-rental industry.

Property investor Barry Sternlicht called Jon Gray, head of real estate for Blackstone Group LP, in the spring proposing a combination of Starwood Waypoint Homes, of which Sternlicht is chairman, and Invitation Homes Inc., majority-owned by Blackstone. The companies announced the $4.3 billion merger Thursday after months sorting out the details, creating a company that will be the largest U.S. single-family landlord, with 82,000 homes across the country…

• Home starts unexpectedly rise to annualized 222,324 units
• Condo construction in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver surge

Canadian home construction is on pace for its best year since the 2008-2009 recession, with builders showing no sign of being slowed by rising interest rates or fears of a housing correction.

Work began on an annualized 222,324 homes in July, the third-fastest monthly pace since 2012, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. reported Wednesday. Starts have averaged about 215,000 in 2017, which puts the industry on track for the most new residential construction since 2007 if the current pace continues…

If New York home sellers had big dreams when they listed their properties, now they’re adjusting to reality.

In most Manhattan neighborhoods, at least 25 percent of homes on the market in the second quarter had their prices cut. The share was smaller only at the borough’s northernmost tip, in Inwood and Marble Hill. In prime areas such as the West Village and Chelsea, about half of listings had their prices trimmed…

In Manhattan and Brooklyn, Home Sellers Get a Reality Check

• Ethics agreement made Treasury chief sell dozens of assets
• Asset sale prices could have reached as much as $53 million

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin made at least $15 million from his entertainment and real estate interests that he sold to comply with federal conflict of interest rules, according to a filing released Monday.

Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive and hedge fund manager, made the sales in May, according to the transaction report, which was released by the Treasury Department. Ethics rules don’t require disclosure of buyers’ identities, and the reports show the sale prices only in broad ranges. According to the filing, Mnuchin could have made as much as $53 million on the sales…

• Mortgage takes up biggest proportion of income in 19 years
• City’s housing prices highest on record: Centaline Property

Living in the world’s most-expensive property market means having to set aside more than half your income as mortgage payments. Hong Kong’s mortgage-payment-to-income ratio rose to 54.2 percent in June, the highest since 1998, figures from Centaline Property Agency show…

Hong Kong Housing Burden Grows Even Heavier as Home Prices Soar

• Monthly London rents slid for fourth successive time in July
• ‘Transformed’ London now acting as ‘brake’ on overall U.K.

The cost of renting a home in London fell for the fourth month in a row, continuing the first period of decline since 2009 as Britain’s exit from the European Union rattles the U.K. capital’s real-estate market.

The average monthly rent paid for new lettings in greater London in July was 1,564 pounds ($2,039), a 0.6 percent decline from a year earlier, according to a statement from HomeLet, the U.K.’s largest reference-checking and rentals-insurance company. Rents across the U.K. gained 1.1 percent overall, led by increases in Northern Ireland and Scotland…

• Fall of 4.6 percent is biggest one-month decline since 2000
• Decline about market ‘psychology,’ board president says

Home prices in Canada’s largest city posted their biggest monthly drop in at least 17 years in July and sales plunged as government efforts to cool the market and the near-collapse of a mortgage lender made buyers leery.

The benchmark Toronto property price, which tracks a typical home over time, dropped 4.6 percent to C$773,000 ($613,000) from June. That’s the biggest monthly drop since records for the price index began in 2000, according to Bloomberg calculations, and brings prices down to roughly March levels. Prices are still up 18 percent from the same month a year ago, according to the Toronto Real Estate Board…

• Mizrahi is weighing $400 million bid for Union Bank of Israel
• Israeli home prices are slowing after government intervened

Mizrahi Tefahot Bank Ltd.’s planned bid for a smaller rival signals a shift away from the Israeli housing market that transformed it into the country’s most profitable lender.

Mizrahi, Israel’s third-largest bank by assets, is considering a $400 million offer for Union Bank of Israel Ltd., according to a stock market filing on Monday. The banks are in talks for a tie-up in which Mizrahi would purchase all traded shares of Union Bank for as much as 60 percent of its equity, according to the statement.

• Almost one in two Toronto young adults reside with parent
• Statistics Canada releases census data on family formation

The rising cost of housing in Canada is having at least one major impact on the make-up of families: fewer kids are leaving home.

The share of Canadians aged 20 to 34 who were living with a parent has increased to 34.7 percent, according to census data released by Statistics Canada on Wednesday. That’s up from 33.3 percent in the last census five years earlier and from 30.6 percent in 2001.