The average rate on the standard 30-year fixed mortgage dropped below 6.5% last week in the sharpest decline of the year. That was more than a percentage point lower than its peak last year of nearly 8%.

More than $40 billion of office loans were in distress at the end of the second quarter, which is around three times the value of distressed apartment loans. But the pool of apartment mortgages that could get into difficulty in the future is larger—$56.9 billion are at risk of distress, compared with $50.9 billion for offices.

Major department stores now occupy less than half of all anchor spaces at enclosed shopping malls, with roughly 500 vacant department-store spaces nationwide.

A July poll showed that voters rank housing as their second biggest concern when it comes to high prices—behind only groceries. That is a shift from a November 2021 poll, which found that housing was ranked below the cost of groceries, gas and utility bills.

Office is by far the most troubled property class. In the second quarter, the volume of office property seized in foreclosures and other actions was up about $5 billion from the second quarter of 2023. Apartment buildings, which have been hit hard by the increase in interest rates and the crush of new supply, had a $975 million increase during the same period.

In the second quarter, portfolios of foreclosed and seized office buildings, apartments and other commercial property reached $20.5 billion. That is a 13% increase from the first quarter and the highest quarterly figure since 2015.

A Government Accountability Office review of 24 federal agencies last year estimated that 17 of them used on average one-quarter or less of the capacity of their headquarters buildings during a three-week sample period.

The torrent of supply has pushed Manhattan’s office availability rate to 17.9% by the end of June, down a fraction from the 18.1% all-time-high recorded in the first quarter.

There are about $260 billion of the deals, known as single-asset, single-borrower bonds, that purchased skyscrapers, shopping centers and other properties. These so-called SASB bonds were meant to be ultrasafe, but the rate of loans at or near default has nearly tripled over two years, hitting 8.7% in 2024.

Even with the higher eviction rates in several major cities, evictions more broadly have settled to roughly where they were before the pandemic. The first five months of the year had about 422,000 filings for eviction across the 33 cities and an additional 10 states tracked, down slightly from prepandemic norms in those same places.