I am always collecting real estate news articles to share with clients. Here are some recent, random tidbits:
O’ahu minimum rental period changes to 90 Days
As of October 1, 2025, the City & County of Honolulu has increased the minimum rental from 30 days to 90 consecutive days per tenant. This applies for all residential neighborhoods.
Resort zones (some of Waikiki, Turtle Bay, Maunaolu Estates, and Ko Olina) and properties which already had a Non-conforming Use (NUC) license may still allow short-term rentals. Always double check if a condo building has stricter rules than the C&C. Short-term rentals in operation with a license before the ordinance was passed may also be exempt.
Please reach out to me with specific questions about your property. Here’s the link to the actual City Ordinance 25-02 (Bill 62).
New Kaka’ako condos: Kali’u and Kahuina
I recently attended sales presentations for two upcoming Kaka’ako condo buildings just Ewa/west of Ward Avenue:
Kali’u is a luxury building which will front Ala Moana Blvd, right in the heart of SALT and the Kamehameha Schools master plan neighborhood.
Kahuina will be one block mauka, at what will be a major retail hub at the intersection of Auahi and Cooke Streets. The two towers are being developed by Stanford Carr, and will have both “affordable” and market units. Applications are available now, with pricing and sales starting soon.
New homes continue in Kapolei and Waipio
The Kapolei planned neighborhood of H’oopili by D.R. Horton continues to grow, as does Castle & Cooke’s Central O’ahu Waipio neighborhood, Koa Ridge. These new builds often have developer financing with much lower mortgage interest rates than the open market—I am seeing marketing for 5.5% interest.
My connections at these new developments are happy to schedule us to visit the sales centers and models. Let me know if you’re interested!
Real help for first time buyers
I have a buyer currently in escrow who qualified for a $40,000 Down Payment Assistance Loan (DPAL) from the City & County of Honolulu. It is a second mortgage loan, and the buyer has 20 years to pay it off—at zero percent interest!
One of the non-profits I love and support any way I can is the Hawaii HomeOwnership Center. The HHOC also offers DPAL loans as well as homebuyer education and counseling. Check out this link to HHOC Mortgage to see the various DPAL loans (also at zero or 3% interest). Please call me to connect with one of their loan officers to see if you qualify!
Lastly, another client educated me recently how they were able to obtain an OHA “Access to Home Ownership” Loan for Native Hawaiian buyers. If you are on the OHA registry as someone with Native Hawaiian ancestry, check out the link and application here.
The dangers of AI and why I try very hard to avoid it
Are you one of the 800 million (as of Oct 2025) users of ChatGPT? Some similar chatbots are Gemini, Copilot, Claude, and Grok—all are competing to get your data and information to feed their “Large Language Models” (LLM). The more data users willingly input and give it, the more these chatbots learn and improve. Some users are going beyond asking for information and asking for advice and even companionship.
These chatbots come with risks:
Inquiries, commands, uploaded photos, and conversations are not private—even “temporary” chats are kept for at least 30 days according to ChatGPT’s user FAQ’s. Your personal information can be fed into “the machine” to enlarge the model. Info you give can be used against you, for example, as evidence in a court of law.
The responses you receive from an AI chatbot are designed to slant positive to make you feel good and keep you coming back. The responses can also be downright incorrect, racist, and biased. “Hallucinations” are presented as factual.
The chatbots often steer a user down a dark path. So far, two different teen ChatGPT users have committed suicide—aided by the promptings and subtle approval and teaching from ChatGPT how to do it.
Not just children but many adults are shying away from real, face-to-face human connection anymore, thinking a chatbot can replace friendship or emotional support. Will humanity gradually lose the ability to relate with each other?
“AI slop” refers to completely fake Facebook posts, articles, photos, and videos. Here’s a short and illuminating podcast I listened to recently.
One of these types of AI slop are “deepfake” AI impersonations. These videos are created and used by scammers to replicate voice or video likeness to trick friends and family.
When I was about to publish my book, I found someone had copied my marketing about the book and posted an eerily similar book for sale on Amazon. Here’s my post about getting hacked by AI. This is personal for me as a writer!
Writers and others in creative professions (actors, photographers) are railing against AI and trying to protect our intellectual property. I would rather take 30 minutes to write a personal and pertinent business email than entrust it to AI. My second book is taking a couple years and counting, but when it’s done, I can proudly say I wrote it without the help of AI.
If you have received an email from my work email (AliBan1012@gmail.com) recently, you may have seen this message at the bottom:
When you use AI to compose an email or summarize a long document, you are feeding new information for the LLM to use in the future. Just think of all the private client information contained in a real estate contract!
How do you use AI? Are you like me and resisting it? Please comment or message me!