There is a city which is suffering a worse property bubble than Sydney, whose residents are more priced-out than Londoners, and where there is a greater divide between the housing haves and have-nots than even San Francisco.

That city is Vancouver, and in response to these mounting challenges, the west-coast Canadian metropolis recently imposed an extraordinary new tax on foreign buyers – whose impact is now being watched closely by other cities grappling with bloated property markets. — theguardian.com

U.S. home resales unexpectedly fell in August, crimped by a shortage of inventory that is boosting home prices faster than the pace of wage growth.

The National Association of Realtors said on Thursday existing home sales declined 0.9 percent to an annual rate of 5.33 million units.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast sales rising 1.1 percent in August to a 5.45 million-unit pace. — Reuters

WHAT are the most dysfunctional parts of the global financial system? China’s banking industry, you might say, with its great wall of bad debts and state-sponsored cronyism. Or the euro zone’s taped-together single currency, which stretches across 19 different countries, each with its own debts and frail financial firms. Both are worrying. But if sheer size is your yardstick, nothing beats America’s housing market. — the Economist

OK, so this would mean the way to make San Francisco as affordable as (say) Portland would be to either cut everybody’s salary in half, or fire half of them, or allow the city’s population to rapidly grow about 50 percent, to about 1.2 million, while the number of housing units increased even faster. — Michael Andersen, on Medium

strict zoning laws in the Bay Area make it almost impossible to significantly expand the housing stock there. [...]

As a result, the tech boom simply means that housing gets less and less affordable for anyone who doesn't work in tech or already own a home.

A lot of people are blaming the tech boom itself for the Bay Area's housing problems. But the technology boom is only a problem because the region's housing markets are functioning so poorly. — vox.com

It's hard to remember that just a few decades ago it was difficult, if not impossible, for a woman alone to take out a mortgage. Federal legislation changed that.

And yet, it's still surprising to learn how dominant single women have become in the housing market today: Their share is second only to married couples, and twice that of single men. — npr.org

Although the cranes swing, much of the new living zones now being created range from the ho-hum to the outright catastrophic. The skyline is being plundered for profit, but without creating towers to be proud of or making new neighbourhoods with any positive qualities whatsoever. If London is an enormous party, millions of people are on the wrong side of its velvet rope. — theguardian.com

Everyone knows the supply of new homes in the Bay Area is falling far short of job and population growth, but the number of existing homes being put up for sale is also near record lows in many areas. [...]

“The move-up market is pretty much frozen,” said Matt Fuller, an agent with Zephyr. “Even if you can do great on the sale of your property, you are terrified to enter the market as a buyer.” [...]

Inventory is also shrinking because post-foreclosure sales have dried up. — sfchronicle.com

While some remain cynical about homeownership, the U.S.'s foreign-born population still regards it as a symbol of attaining the American Dream. [...]

Last year, immigrant households made up 11.2 percent of owner-occupied housing according to the JCHS—that’s up from only 6.8 percent in 1994. — theatlantic.com

“It’s not rare for us to go and try to make sure that no one buys the house of someone who’s facing foreclosure,” says Rob Call, an organizer for Occupy Our Homes Atlanta (OOHA). In Georgia, houses are publicly auctioned every first Tuesday of the month on each county courthouse’s steps. "[...] these auctions were mostly vacant. No one was really trying to go after these homes, but then they were [suddenly] swamped with people bidding up houses with quick access to sizable cashier’s checks.” — nextcity.org

One reason for weakness: many young people, saddled with student loan debt, elevated unemployment and less-than-perfect credit scores, are staying out of the market. — NPR

All-cash deals hit a record 43% of home sales during the first three months of 2014, according to RealtyTrac. That's up from 19% a year earlier and the highest level reported since RealtyTrac began tracking the deals in early 2011.

The jump is due to two main factors: strict lending standards that make it difficult to get a mortgage and intense buyer competition. — CNNMoney

Cities like Yingkou in China’s northeast rust belt were among the earliest cities in the country to be overbuilt. [...] Yingkou, along with other cities, sold vast tracts of lands to developers to build apartments for the workers who – they hoped – would populate the new factories, malls and industrial parks to come. [...]

But investments have been slow to materialize, and newcomers are scarce in Yingkou, a city of 2.4 million with a population that hasn’t grown much in the past few years. — blogs.wsj.com