The genesis of high house prices lay in the low interest rates and nimby base home construction codes driven by owners who were deathly afraid of lower priced homes making their piles of brick decline in value. This regime ended with Covid and rates went from ~~2.5% to 5-6%. A few had 30 year mortgages at 2.5-3.5% but a huge number had corporate money market paper at 1-2% - this is great while it lasts, but it is short term, ranging from 30 days to 1-2 years, with the 30 day rates at the bottom. With low rates and efficient property managers and the shortage, these managers were able to keep occupancy rates in the high 90%'s, with aggressive vetting rules and retentive deposit procedures(deny full deposit return for trivial reasons = hoping the tenant will not create a long fight over a small bone - which often needed a small claims court battle, when at a new job far away, some managers got over 100% rent via this overlapped dual rent. Overlay this with AirBNB taking 5-20% of rental off the market where similar closely monitored management with cleaning staff kept occupancy in the 90% area in some places at 3x the apartment rent rate and greatly undercutting hotel rates at 5-10x apartment rates. A great squealing of the stuck pigs(Hotels) and the similarly stuck city tax pigs created insurance pigs and laws that shut down many of these AirBNB's = the worms all turned at once. Places that earned well became losing money pits, and large numbers were soon sold to capture the high prices of their low price circa 1999-2001 purchases. There was also the surf side condo collapse (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KNwMSuwQ8w) where Florida forced condos that were tall/old/salty footed into huge engineering inspections and catch-up reserve rules that made many condos worth less than the paper that was written to finance them. People walked and lost everything = thousands of horror stories on utube... Then AI mediated job losses.... 32,000 under reports this, as many companies have large internal payroll processing that is not reflected in that 32,000. as dyauspitr says = It’s a wasteland out there.

This is a man speeding at 100 MPH into a blizzard with a 1000 car pileup 2 miles ahead!