• Rightmove says political instabiltity may weigh on market
• Nationally, asking prices post biggest June drop since 2009

London home sellers cut asking prices for a second time in three months and waning buyer interest hints that the slowdown may continue.

Prices dropped 2.4 percent in June — the biggest for that month since 2010 — leaving them down 1.4 percent from a year earlier, Rightmove Plc said on Monday. Nationally, asking prices slipped 0.4 percent, pushing the annual gain to the weakest since 2013. In London, buyer activity “remains subdued compared to the recent boom years,” Rightmove said…

Three straight months of declines in new-home construction show U.S. homebuilding may weigh on second-quarter growth, Commerce Department data showed Friday.

Key Takeaways

May starts were pushed lower by declining construction in South, which reached the weakest level since October 2015, and in the Midwest. Construction of single-family properties dropped 3.9 percent to the lowest since September, while ground-breaking on multifamily units declined for a fifth straight month…

Elsewhere, gains are slow and low-income households are paying more rent than ever.

For further evidence of the uneven recovery among U.S. housing markets, how’s this: In the 10 most expensive U.S. metropolitan areas, median home values have increased by 63 percent since 2000, after adjusting for inflation. In the 10 cheapest metros, median values rose by just 3.6 percent.

That finding, and the others illustrated by the charts below, comes from the State of the Nation’s Housing, an annual report published Friday by Harvard University’s Joint Center For Housing Studies. While home prices have increased sharply in expensive coastal cities, plenty of urban centers are lagging behind. Home prices in 3 out of 5 metropolitan areas remain below their pre-recession peak, and home prices in low-income neighborhoods are faring even worse…

• Five of top 10 stocks this year are real estate companies
• JPMorgan continues to see upside in property developer shares

Singapore property stocks are set for their best annual performance in five years, and strategists believe the rally is far from over.

With an expected pickup in real estate following the easing of housing curbs, developers are expected to be the bright spot in Singapore equities as gains in the city-state’s stocks may be limited for the rest of the year.

• Four deals struck already this year as sellers band together
• Redevelopment deals on track for busiest year since 2011

Chalk up another sign Singapore’s housing market is recovering: redevelopment deals are back.

After slowing to a trickle the past three years as housing prices fell, four redevelopment deals — where a group of owners band together to sell entire apartment blocks at a hefty premium — have been struck already this year, with a combined value of S$1.5 billion ($1.1 billion). The process, also known as “en-bloc” sales, allows developers to knock down and rebuild in a city where new residential land sales are tightly controlled by the government…

• Exploring options beyond loan-replacement funding from banks
• Search for new CEO yielding candidates in and outside Canada

Home Capital Group Inc.’s efforts to regain stability could take months, and all options are on the table including a backstop from Canada’s biggest banks, according to a person familiar with the company’s plans.

The C$30 million ($23 million) settlement with the Ontario Securities Commission announced late Wednesday wasn’t a precondition to win a loan to replace costly rescue financing, the person said. So it won’t speed up the funding process or other deals being discussed, according to the person, who asked not to be identified as the plans are private…

• Company says chairman no longer able to perform duties
• Insurer bought New York hotel in 2015 for record $1.95 billion

The conversion of New York’s landmark Waldorf Astoria hotel into luxury condominiums is moving forward as planned and no delays are anticipated after the property’s owner, China’s Anbang Insurance Group Co., said its chairman was no longer able to carry out his duties, according to a company spokesman in the U.S…

Anbang Says Waldorf Astoria Condo Conversion Proceeding Normally

The SPDR S&P Homebuilders ETF, symbol XHB, is headed for a sixth straight daily gain that’s taken it to its highest level in almost two years as the U.S. housing market continues to heat up. Wednesday’s rise is somewhat unusual in that it comes ahead of a Federal Reserve policy decision that’s near certain to deliver increased interest rates. Investors are taking solace in 10-year Treasury note yields that plunged to the lowest level since November…

Homebuilder ETF Rallies as Treasury Yields Tumble

Fancy an apartment the size of a Tesla Model X?

That’s about 161 square feet — and the size of a Hong Kong micro-apartment sold by property giant Henderson Land Development Co. for just less than $500,000. An actual Tesla Model X in Hong Kong starts at around $150,000.

As Hong Kong housing prices reach new highs and keep the city the most unaffordable for housing in the world, developers including billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Cheung Kong Property Holdings Ltd., Kowloon Development Co. and Henderson Land have been offering more and more units of smaller and smaller size. Another developer, Chun Wo Property Development Ltd., plans to build apartments as small as 128 square feet — about the size of a California garden shed…

• ‘Queen of pop’ is latest celebrity to show interest in Lisbon
• Lisbon home prices rose 35% from 2012 to 2016, worrying locals

Rock star Madonna is house hunting in Lisbon, and that has some in Portugal excited. For others, the city’s allure spells unaffordable property prices.

The U.S. singer, the latest celebrity to consider a home in Lisbon, last month visited a hilltop palace that belonged to Antonio Champalimaud, who was Portugal’s richest man when he died in 2004, according to Gustavo Soares, the head of Sotheby’s International Realty in the country. Madonna also visited a few estates in the lush-green hills of Sintra, near Lisbon, he said…

Is flipping homes and collecting rent the key to helping more Detroiters benefit from the city’s revival?

An urban revival has to start somewhere, and in the case of Detroit, that place has been downtown.

Coming out of the Great Recession, a handful of real estate developers invested heavily in a bid to lure corporate employers—and, more recently, business travelers and condo buyers—back to the center of the city. That theme has met with occasional criticism that most efforts are intended to make Detroit more appealing to outsiders, without doing much for people who suffered through the city’s infamous decline…

• Homebuilders focused on high-end homes in U.K. capital fall
• Election result probably rules out more property taxes: KF

The U.K. election result will create more uncertainty for the London property market, affecting values and sales volumes, real estate brokers say.

London homebuilders that develop high-end homes dropped after the hung parliament. Crest Nicholson Holdings Plc fell 6.7 percent, the most in 11 months, and was down 5 percent at 580 pence at 1:16 p.m., making it the biggest faller in the FTSE 350 Index. Berkeley Group Holdings Plc, the U.K. capital’s biggest homebuilder, was down 3.4 percent…

• Share of new signings with landlord incentives doubles to 25%
• Brooklyn leases also at a May record in supply-heavy market

It’s a renter’s market in New York City, and apartment-seekers jumped in last month to get themselves a deal.

In Manhattan, the number of newly signed leases climbed 17 percent in May from a year earlier to 5,969, the biggest total for the month in nine years of record-keeping, according to a report Thursday by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. In Brooklyn, new apartment contracts surged 23 percent to 1,460, also the biggest total for the month in data going back to 2008…

Seattle real estate agent Bree Al-Rashid used to spend several hours each week phoning and emailing clients to schedule property tours, producing charts of pricing data in her market, and coordinating house closings. “There were a ton of logistics involved in taking care of customers,” which made her work inefficient, says Al-Rashid, who works for Redfin, an online residential real estate company. Today, many of those tasks are automated on Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing network, leaving Al-Rashid more time to meet with clients—and close more deals.

• Zhu Ning says China home prices could rise another 50 percent
• Buyers see property market curbs as a bluff to be reversed

China’s home prices could rise by another 50 percent in the nation’s biggest cities, as the latest measures to rein them in are likely to be eased by policy makers seeking to support the broader economy.

So says Zhu Ning, deputy director of the National Institute of Financial Research at Tsinghua University in Beijing and author of “China’s Guaranteed Bubble: How Implicit Government Support Has Propelled China’s Economy While Creating Systemic Risk.” As measures to curb housing prices drag on growth in the second half and early next year, he says, the government will resort to its old playbook of dialing them back again to shore up expansion…

The cost of renting a home in the U.K. capital fell the most in eight years in May as a glut of rental properties came onto the market and affordability issues led Londoners to seek cheaper accommodation.

The average monthly rent paid in May for new lettings in Greater London was 1,502 pounds ($1,940), a 3 percent decline from a year earlier, HomeLet, the U.K.’s largest reference-checking and rentals insurance company, said in a statement on Tuesday. Rents across the U.K. fell 0.3 percent from a year earlier, the first annual decline since December 2009, the data shows…

The steady rise in U.S. home sales is translating into big-time hiring in residential specialty trade contracting. In May, another 5,100 jobs were added, marking the ninth month in the last 10 of employment gains in the sector, according to latest jobs report from the Labor Department on Friday. Over the last six years, the economy added a half million home contractor jobs — a 32 percent increase from the end of 2011 that dwarfs the 12 percent advance in total private employment…

Home Contractor Employment Flourishes in the U.S.

• Industry took advantage of second-warmest period on record
• Gains helped by home improvements, boosting employment

If you’re building or renovating a home in the U.S. these days, you’ve got plenty of company.

Americans’ spending on residential construction projects — from the pouring of foundations to home improvement — just hammered out its strongest three-month period since 1994.

Solid job growth, low borrowing costs and a recovery in home equity since the market crash a decade ago are generating momentum. The outsized advance in outlays also has its roots in more than favorable conditions for building across the U.S. After all, the first four months of 2017 were the second-warmest on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration…

The housing market is deep into mania.  You can see it in the eyes of the house lusting buyers and the overweight Taco Tuesday baby boomers drooling at their mouth trying to justify why their World War II built crap shack is worth $1 million.  The market has gotten unhinged and in this environment you keep hearing things like “crazy” and “insane” and “what the hell is going on?” over and over.  That sure inspires confidence and stability!  Yet people want to commit to a 30-year fixed mortgage on a dump.  In a time when flexibility is key and being nimble in your mind is paramount, you have old thinking boomers trying to infect people with this old paradigm of how business is done.  And the telling thing is what is happening right now is not any different from what happened in the last crisis.  Mortgage debt is down because a large part of recent buying has come from investors!  Of course mortgage debt in aggregate is down when many investors pay in cash – that is why the homeownership rate is also down.  Duh!  But overall household debt is up thanks to people loading up on student loans, auto debt, and credit card debt.  Yet this is somehow better?  Just look at some of the wild examples in the real estate market…

• Bank of Canada faces calls to raise rates, cool home prices
• BoC Governor has said interest rates are a blunt instrument

The old debate about whether central banks should raise rates to counteract housing bubbles is finding new life in Canada as the country copes with record prices in its two biggest real estate markets.

Toronto home prices were still up almost 30 percent last month, compared with the previous year, the city’s real estate board reported Monday, and have more than doubled since the 2008-2009 recession. In Vancouver, the country’s most-expensive real estate market, they’ve climbed 58 percent over four years. Meanwhile, household debt is at record levels, recently surpassing gross domestic product for the first time…

The housing market is running on opioid induced euphoria and the tentacles of mania are deep into every large metro area.  You would think given all this unchecked optimism that mortgage originations would be near a record level since you would assume people are out buying in mass.  Yet that is not the case.  What is happening is people are fighting over the scraps with low inventory and are bidding prices up on crap shacks to ridiculous levels.  And there is data to back this up which is important because people are living in an alternative reality.  Loan origination volume hit a three year low this year.  What?  How is that possible when all the cheerleaders are out in the streets preaching the good gospel of buying real estate?  Well the reality is that a good portion of the market is still driven by investors…

• Index rises to 56 in May, a far better reading than forecast
• Manufacturing survey earlier this week showed solid activity

Britain’s construction industry unexpectedly picked up last month, growing at the fastest pace since 2015 as housing strengthened.

IHS Markit’s monthly index rose to 56 in May from 53.1 in April, a far better reading than the decline to 52.6 forecast by economists. Workloads increased the most this year and the pace of hiring also improved, according to the report published Friday…

U.K. Housing Lifts Construction Growth to Strongest Since 2015

• Canada’s urban concentrations open investment opportunities
• Holdings include Killam Apartment REIT, First Capital Realty

Sprott Asset Management LP is buying Canada’s real estate investment trusts because residents have no where else to go.

More than a third of Canadians live in the Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver metropolitan areas, 2016 census data show, while peers New York, Los Angeles and Chicago account for just a 10th of the U.S. population. This concentration opens investment opportunities in urban areas, according to Dennis Mitchell, who helps oversee C$3.1 billion ($2.3 billion) at Toronto-based Sprott…

The median home size decreased slightly in 2016, but it’s still historically high at a time when smaller houses are in demand.

It’s not quite a tiny-house movement, but homebuyers frustrated by the lack of listings that fit their budget will probably take it.

In the aftermath of the U.S. foreclosure crisis, homebuilders focused on the top end of the market, where it was easier to find attractive profit margins and credit-worthy borrowers. The median size of a new single-family home increased year after year, reaching a high of 2,467 square feet in 2015—49 percent bigger than in 1978 and 8 percent larger than the prerecession peak in 2007…

Housing demand unexpectedly weakened for a second month across most U.S. regions as lean inventory took a toll on affordability, putting a damper on the typically busier spring selling season, according to National Association of Realtors figures released Wednesday…

U.S. Pending Home Sales Falter

SYDNEY, Australia — Wall Street has started a bidding war for Fairfax Media, an Australian company best known for the dowdy business of publishing newspapers. To understand why, look no further than Deanna McMath.

Ms. McMath, owner of a small business specializing in print and design, is trying to determine the value of the fixer-upper house she bought in 2009 in the Sydney suburb of Stanmore, and whether to sell it and cash in on the area’s wild property boom. Where she once would turn to the real estate pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, a Fairfax paper, she now scours two online real estate portals: Realestate.com.au, which is part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, under News Corporation, and Domain, which has quietly become Fairfax’s most lucrative business…

• Broker says his job ‘is always to push the envelope’
• Apartment listing is in line with Manhattan’s climbing prices

On New York City’s Roosevelt Island, a sliver of land across the East River from Manhattan, real estate broker Ben Garama is trying to set a record — and make a statement.

The Corcoran Group agent has listed a three-bedroom condo there for $2 million, the highest price ever sought — or paid — for a residence on the island, once home to a smallpox hospital and now bustling with construction of a new Cornell University campus…

• Measure of home price expectations tumbles from record in May
• Confidence on economy falls to lowest since November: survey

Canadians became less confident this month about housing and prospects for the economy amid the troubles of a Toronto mortgage lender, according to telephone polling.

The Bloomberg Nanos Canadian Confidence Index fell to 58.5 in the week ending May 26. That’s down from 59.4 at the end of April, the first monthly decline in four. The share of respondents who felt home prices would rise dropped to 45.5 percent, from a record 50.1 percent this month…

• Buyers queue to get a shot at newly-released developments
• Newspaper describes property market as ‘becoming crazier’

Snaking queues of thousands of prospective apartment buyers in Hong Kong signaled authorities have made no progress in cooling a red-hot property market, where prices are at records.

People were lining up on Friday and over the weekend at Victoria Skye, a luxury project at the former airport site of Kai Tak, and at the Ocean Pride development by Cheung Kong Property Holdings Ltd. and MTR Corp…

Hong Kong Throngs of Thousands Defy Bid to Cool Home Market

A rally for Chinese property stocks added a combined $5.4 billion to the fortunes of three tycoons alone on Monday. None fared better than Hui Ka Yan, the richest of them all, whose China Evergrande Group has built him a net worth of nearly $21 billion. Among the others, Yang Huiyan of Country Garden Holdings Co. added $1.3 billion Monday, while Wu Yajun of Longfor Properties Co. tacked on $400 million, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The rally has been confounding analysts focusing particularly on Evergrande, which trades at about 36 times reported earnings, more than double the valuations of Country Garden…

• Overheating risks rise in housing markets of smaller cities
• Buyers locked out of home cities seize opportunities elsewhere

When a 59-year-old accountant in Shanghai wanted to invest for her looming retirement, she bought two cheap apartments — on the other side of the country.

“When friends told me about a chance to buy properties in Xishuangbanna, I thought ‘why not?”’ said Yuan Junxi, talking of the steamy, subtropical region in Yunnan province, bordering Laos and Myanmar. “No buying limits; cheap, easy mortgages; and maybe property prices will jump over there too.”…

• Homes went into contract this year after average 8% discounts
• Deals jumped when buyers ‘saw they could get a break’

Owners of Manhattan luxury homes are waking up to a simple reality: If you want your place to sell, drop your price.

For high-end homes that found buyers in 2017, the median asking price was the lowest in at least five years, according to data from luxury brokerage Olshan Realty Inc., which measures contracts for $4 million or more. Last week, the median asking price for deals in that range was $4,997,500, the lowest since September and only the fourth week since 2013 that it dipped below $5 million.

Home prices in the U.S. increased 6 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier as competition heated up for a scarcity of listings.

Prices rose 1.4 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from the previous three months, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said in a statement Wednesday. In March, prices climbed 0.6 percent from February, matching the average estimate of 15 economists.

Job growth is firing up demand for real estate, pushing buyers into bidding wars for the tight supply of homes on the market. There were 1.83 million previously owned homes available for sale at the end of March, down 6.6 percent from a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors…

• Home Capital woes combined with new tax measures cool market
• Listings soar in first half of May as sellers rush in

Toronto’s hot housing market has entered a new phase: jittery.

After a double whammy of government intervention and the near-collapse of Home Capital Group Inc., sellers are rushing to list their homes to avoid missing out on the recent price gains. The new dynamic has buyers rethinking purchases and sellers asking why they aren’t attracting the bidding wars their neighbors saw just a few weeks ago in Canada’s largest city…