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Property and casualty insurers operating in Florida say they are just beginning the massive effort of assessing damage left by Ian’s assault through southwestern and Central Florida on Wednesday and Thursday, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported. Accurate damage estimates might not be available for days, after teams of adjusters fan out and assign dollar amounts to the wreckage they inspect. Early estimates by catastrophe risk modelers project that Ian’s insured losses in Florida — excluding claims to the National Flood Insurance Program — will be in the $30 billion to $50 billion range, according to Reinsurance News and an investor-focused website artemis.bm. Fitch Ratings estimated insured losses between $25 billion and $40 billion. Meanwhile, stock prices for publicly traded insurers and reinsurers exposed to losses in Florida were stable on Thursday, suggesting the investment community believes that the cost of rebuilding what Ian damaged won’t break the industry. Florida’s Office of Insurance Regulation will begin collecting daily claims and loss totals from all insurers beginning Friday. After hurricanes, the office typically posts running tallies on its website. State Farm Florida, one of the state’s three largest insurers, received 4,300 claims by 3:30 p.m. Thursday, mostly from Lee, Charlotte, Orange, Collier, and Polk counties, spokeswoman Heather Paul said.

Igal Namdar built a multibillion-dollar property empire buying financially troubled shopping malls. Now he’s following a similar playbook with Manhattan offices, acquiring aging buildings as the city struggles to recover from historically high vacancies, Bloomberg News reported. Namdar and joint-venture partner Empire Capital Holdings paid $72 million this month for 830 Third Ave., a 13-floor tower built in 1958. The deal followed last September’s purchase of 345 Seventh Ave. — more than 90 years old, with 24 stories — for $107 million. For both buildings, the prices amounted to less than $500 a square foot. That’s far lower than the average for Manhattan offices of $896 a square foot, August data from MSCI Real Assets show. Values have fallen from a pre-pandemic peak of $1,000 a square foot in February 2019. “New York City’s hitting a rough patch now, but we believe long-term, people are not going to work at home,” Namdar said in an interview. “Once everything is settled and, hopefully, the economy gets better, you’re going to see a lot more companies come back and rent space.” A comeback may take time. In the second quarter, Manhattan office vacancies reached their highest level recorded in more than two decades, at 15.8%, according to Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. The rate for Class-B offices, such as the buildings Namdar is targeting, was 17.1%.

Apartment rents are falling from record highs across the U.S. for the first time in nearly two years, offering the prospect of relief to millions of tenants who have seen steep increases during the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported. August apartment asking rents nationally fell 0.1% from July, according to a report from property data company CoStar Group. It was the first monthly decline in rent since December 2020, the company said. Other surveys also showed rent declines of various degrees. Apartment-listing website Rent.com showed a 2.8% decrease in rent for one-bedroom apartments during the same month. A third measure, by the listings website Realtor.com, also noted a slight monthly decline in rent this August. Last month’s rent declines are modest compared with the 23% overall increase in rent since August 2020, according to Realtor.com, and there is no guarantee that rents won’t move up again. As more households feel priced out of the sales market because of rising mortgage rates and near-record sales prices, overall demand for rentals is unlikely to fall drastically, said Orphe Divounguy, an economist at Zillow Group.

Andy Jenks, a sixth-generation Illinois farmer, owns shares in a small real-estate investment trust called Farmland Partners Inc. but rarely thought about them. That changed on July 11, 2018. That morning, a writer going by the name Rota Fortunae published an article on an investing website, Seeking Alpha, alleging Farmland was at risk of insolvency, the Wall Street Journal reported. Some investors had shorted the company, betting Farmland’s stock was poised to decline. It did, and by the end of the day, Farmland was down 39%. It took more than two years for the share price to recover. Denver-based Farmland sued Rota Fortunae in Colorado federal court. The company accused the writer, whose real name is Quinton Mathews, of posting a “false and misleading” article to drive down the company’s shares. Farmland also sued a Dallas hedge fund, Sabrepoint Capital Management, in Colorado federal court and Texas state court, accusing it of working with Mathews for the same purpose. Mathews later said key parts of his article were incorrect, a statement he issued to settle Farmland’s lawsuit. Sabrepoint disputed Farmland’s allegations, saying it didn’t instruct Mr. Mathews to write his report and didn’t pay him to do it. Judges in both states dismissed Farmland’s lawsuits against the hedge fund, though Farmland is appealing in Texas.

Home prices in August were down about 6% from their peak in June, the biggest 2-month drop in prices in nearly a decade. The pace of home sales slowed for the 7th straight month, NPR.org. "The housing market certainly reacts to the monetary policy change," says Lawrence Yun, the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors which just released the new existing home sales numbers. The Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates to fight inflation. Mortgage rates anticipate future moves by the fed and bond markets more broadly, so they rose very sharply earlier this year — from around 3% to up above 6%. Just about all economists agree that this is not a housing crash and that this situation is different than in 2008, when the bottom fell out of the housing market. Right now, the nation is in the midst of a severe housing shortage. For a decade following the 2008 crash, builders didn't build enough homes. Today homes are still getting snapped up by buyers and put under-agreement in near-record time — just 16 days on average.

The cost of renting a home in the U.S. is surging and young workers have felt the sharpest pain, many of them taking on additional jobs or roommates to afford housing costs, Reuters reported. Household rents in 2021 jumped 10% from pre-pandemic levels, according to Census Bureau estimates released last week. The figures came as rising healthcare and rental costs pushed U.S. consumer prices up unexpectedly last month. The data from the bureau’s annual American Community Survey put median U.S. rent at $1,037 in 2021, up from $941 in 2019. Year-over-year increases in the median household rent over the past decade were typically 2% or 3% — one exception was the 5% rise from 2018 to 2019. Adding to renters' woes, rents in the professionally-managed sector — usually larger properties operated by management companies — have risen even more dramatically. Annual rent growth there hit 11.6% at the end of 2021 and start of 2022, about three times what it was in the five years prior to the pandemic, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. At the same time, vacancy rates fell to their lowest since 1984 as post-pandemic demand surged.