I've been hearing a lot more about inflation concerns and how inflation would benefit those with a lot of debt. Of course, that benefit would depend on whether their earnings would match the rate of inflation, which means it would really only benefit those with flexible revenue streams and not those with fixed yearly incomes, so this really only leaves those who have become incredibly wealthy through debt and large businesses.
Democrats are really trying to spend as much money as they can it seems with more and more trillion dollar plans on top of the yearly budget, so it seems increasingly likely that this plan not only tries to appeal to those easily persuaded by freebies, but is also intentionally destroying the economy in the interest of the wealthy elites, which most likely includes many of the politicians currently in office, so that they can pay off the exorbitant amounts of debt that they have used to get that wealth.
It's just astounding how reckless the silent generation/boomers have been in destroying everything their predecessors built. They will never own up to their mistakes and instead would rather take the whole system down to stay afloat for 5 minutes longer than the rest of us.
That might not just be the rich in the US purchasing those properties. A lot of those "site unseen" purchases might very well be from international sources, particularly China.
It's been a big problem in Vancouver for a long time and in the past 5 years or so has started to be a problem in the Seattle/Redmond/Bellevue area. To the point that high-end real estate firms have started advertising in Mandarin and have agents fluent in it.
I’ve had foreign owned companies calling asking to buy my property all the sudden.
I sold a "starter home" property in a HCOL area a few years back. The buyer didn't put 20% down: it was more like 4%.
A little "trick" agents play that (at least partially) explains why houses go above asking: normally you can't roll closing costs into the mortgage, but you can bump up the purchase price and roll a "buyer's credit" that happens to be equal to the closing costs into the purchase agreement. As long as you're not going so crazy the appraiser can't even put their thin veneer of objectivity over the deal, everyone's happy. The buyer pays off the closing costs with their mortgage, the seller gets paid, and the agents get a little bump in sale price they get to use when doing comps.
Sometimes it takes less effort to sell the $500k home.
Redfin at one point tried the "salaried agent, fixed price to sell your house" model but I think they had some trouble finding agents. Turns out the sort of person attracted to sales also wants the big payday when they close. Now they do 1% commission instead of 3%, and I assume they give their agents a base salary to make up for the difference.
As a person in real estate, I will say that real estate attracts a lot of shady individuals that would rather game the system than actually do their jobs.
The hyperinflation of real estate is literally decades of pushing "everyone must own a home" mentality. That's what led to the massive increase of real estate prices.
Before mortgages for everyone you needed to put 25% down on a house for any bank to even consider you. This meant prices mostly remained fixed or accounted for inflation. Then when they decides everyone should get a mortgage and the government backed it the banks stopped caring. It didn't matter if you had no down payment or could pay the mortgage because to the bank either the Gov would bail them out or the homeowner would refinance every year because prices kept going up and eventually the bank would make their money back and a profit.