Real Estate

  Bloomberg Norwegians love their homes. Nearly 85% of them own the property they live in, usually with the help of a bank. So much so, in fact, that Norway has the highest proportion of mortgages in Europe – 65.6% of the population has a home loan, according to latest available data from Eurostat. That questionable record is partly the ...

  Bloomberg Manhattan renters left their apartments in search of better deals last month, pushing back against landlord price increases and taking advantage of a flood of new choices on the market. New apartment leases totaled 5,203, a 34 percent jump from a year earlier and the first increase for June since 2012, according to a report by appraiser Miller ...

  Singapore / AFP A top Singapore bank said on Thursday it has suspended loans to anyone wanting to buy property in London, citing uncertainty from Britain’s vote to quit the EU but dealing a blow to investors looking to make the most of the weak pound. United Overseas Bank (UOB), one of the city-state’s three homegrown lenders, said it ...

  Bloomberg Washington’s Watergate office building, made famous by the political scandal that brought down President Richard M. Nixon, is under contract to be sold. New York real estate investment firm Steinbridge Group and Dallas-based Lincoln Property Co. are buying 2500 and 2600 Virginia Ave. NW, also known as Watergate East, for $107 million, according to the document by brokerage ...

  Bloomberg Cornerstone Real Estate Advisers, an asset manager owned by Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., agreed to buy ACRE Capital Holdings LLC in a bet on multifamily loans. Cornerstone agreed to pay $93 million to purchase the Plano, Texas-based lender from Ares Commercial Real Estate Corp., the buyer said on Wednesday in a statement. The deal will double Cornerstone’s ...

  Bloomberg Homebuilder Sunac China Holdings Ltd. has temporarily stopped buying land from government auctions in China because prices surged amid a housing rebound, Chairman Sun Hongbin said. “We’ve suspended all bidding recently and didn’t even sign up” for auctions by local governments, Sun said at a briefing. “I feel the risk is too high,” he said without giving a ...

  Bloomberg Canada’s province of British Columbia will end self-regulation of the real estate industry as government officials move to rein in unethical practices that may be stoking home prices in Vancouver, one of North America’s fastest-appreciating cities. “The real estate sector has had 10 years to get it right on self regulation and they haven’t,” Premier Christy Clark said. ...

  Bloomberg Office landlords are bracing for a cooling of San Francisco’s red-hot market as weaker startup valuations and lower venture-capital funding temper years of runaway growth in the technology-industry hub. The city’s office-vacancy rate jumped in the second quarter by the most since the last recession, while the amount of space available for sublease almost doubled, according to a ...

  Bloomberg Allianz Real Estate is set to make its biggest Asian investment to date, in a first step toward adding as much 3 billion euros ($3.3 billion) of real estate in the region within three years. The $150 million pan-Asian fund investment will allow Allianz SE’s property unit to test the water before buying buildings directly, Francois Trausch, chief ...

  AFP Barcelona city hall on Tuesday announced a 20-fold hike, to €600,000 euros ($660,000), in the maximum fine that can be levied against home rental sites such as Airbnb if they promote illegal accommodation. Under a 2012 regional law, any apartment rented to visitors in Catalonia must be logged in the province’s Tourism Registry and have a permit. In ...