New building permits for private housing in the U.S. fell by a seasonally adjusted 21.1% in April compared with a year earlier, while construction starts were down 22.3%

Share prices of the five largest real-estate investment trusts that concentrate on downtown office buildings were down an average 63% in June compared to the end of 2019. Price declines were much smaller for REITs focused on retail property down 7% and apartment-focused REITs down 8%.

The average of six national rental-price measures shows new-lease asking rents rose just under 2% over the 12 months ending in May. That is down from the double-digit increases of a year ago and represents the largest deceleration over any year in recent history.

In the first quarter, banks’ real-estate loans, excluding residential single- to four-family homes, yielded 5.4%. That represented a rise of more than 1.7 percentage points over a year earlier. Those residential home-loan yields, by contrast, rose just over 0.6 point from a year earlier, to 3.96%.

The ratio of money banks lent out compared to property value dropped to 51% LTV this spring, a 30-year low in commercial mortgages.

On a year-over-year basis, the home price index rose 0.7% in March, down from a 2.1% annual rate the prior month. The annual increase was the smallest since May 2012.

Office REIT stock prices posted a 48% decline since the start of 2020. Over that same period, the S&P 500 index is up 37%.

Banks with less than $250 billion in assets account for 29.9% of the nearly $1.5 trillion in commercial real estate debt is maturing by the end of 2025.

The national median existing-home price fell 1.7% in April from a year earlier to $388,800, the biggest year-over-year price decline in eleven years. Median prices were down 6% from a record $413,800 in June.

The total value of office property bought by investors in the first quarter of this year was $10.7 billion, down 68% from the same period last year.