Blackstone Halts Home Purchases In 38 Cities As Market Crashes

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Home Partners of America, the single-family landlord owned by Blackstone, the largest residential and commercial landlord in the US, will stop buying homes in 38 US cities, becoming the latest institutional investor to back away from an overheated housing market.

Bloomberg reported just after the close today, all those who had defended housing as backstopped by Wall Street's biggest firms and thus unlikely to crash, were suddenly silenced.

https://www.zerohedge.com/mark...

Nearly 70% of homes for sale in Boise, ID, had a price drop in July, the highest share of the 97 metros in this analysis. Next come Denver, where 58% of homes for sale had a price drop, Salt Lake City (56.4%) and Tacoma, WA (54.8%). Those four metros also topped the list in June, and Boise, Salt Lake City and Tacoma were also among the 10 metros with the biggest upticks in their price-drop rates from a year earlier.

Tampa, FL (52.1%), Sacramento, CA (52%), Indianapolis (51.4%), Phoenix (50.1%), San Diego (49.7%) and Portland, OR (48.3%) round out the top 10. More than half of those metros–Boise, Denver, Tacoma, Sacramento, Phoenix, San Diego and Portland–are among the 20 housing markets that cooled fastest in the first half of 2022 after attracting scores of eager homebuyers during the pandemic.

“Individual home sellers and builders were both quick to drop their prices early this summer, mostly because they had unrealistic expectations of both price and timelines.

[Darren Finney]

I feel like if you just look at these stats with no context then you'll start getting worried and believe "the market is crashing"...but in reality it's probably just resetting back to a normal level.  What percentage of homes had price cuts prior to the insanity of the last couple of years?  And what percentage of the stated price reductions this year have been related to bad real estate agents and foolish sellers trying to continue to capitalize on that former market insanity and pushing their initial list price past where a good agent would know the property would sell? 

People here in Indianapolis are still buying and selling houses.  Interest rates aren't that crazy but I do think as money gets more expensive you as a seller have to realize that you're trying to appease a different buyer than what you would have over the last couple of years.  What I mean by that is if you're selling a house for $400k now, you need to provide a product that buyers would have expected to get at $450k over the last couple of years; you need nicer finishes, you need to correct the functional issues that you may have previously left, and you have to pay attention to the details.  I think a lot of the lesser quality rehabbers that have been skating by are going to be weeded out if they don't understand this and execute on it.

Just my two cents.