According to this article[1], large investment companies accounted to 16.1% of all single family home sales in the US in Q2. I'm not an analyst. But, I would think that would be plenty of extra demand to influence the price?

> Because the real estate sector is like 30-40 trillion. 2007 was the result of a massive infusion of debt by unsophisticated retail "investors" who bid prices up far higher than even their rental value. Lending standards dont allow this today.

lol.

2007 was the end of a long road, paved by unsophisticated "money managers" and doubly unsophisticated "bank regulators" and even more unsophisticated "politicians" since WW2.

There are people buying houses for more than their rental value right now where I live. Because there's one crime-ridden trailer park maintained on the freeway nearby to make them all within a certain distance of a "disadvantaged zone" and thus every former manufacturing country factory boss looking to move to the US only has to lose $400-$500 dollars a month to buy his way to the top of the green card list.

A large part of the "foreign ownership" plaguing west-coast cities like Vancouver and Seattle is capital flight from China. In this case, real estate has the valuable property of being harder for a foreign government (who happens to be the government to which the homeowner is subject) to confiscate+liquidate than other assets, so said government will prioritize softer targets. Real estate as an investment class here is acting like a club on a car steering wheel—de-prioritizing theft, rather than inhibiting it.

Sometimes there's just no good alternative. And real estate has less strict AML/KYC laws than other asset classes so we have some shady foreign money coming in.

P/E ratios of much of the S&P500 would indicate prices/values far over the fundamental value, yet investors continue to flock to large-cap equities in droves.