The other thing that’s “artificially” driving housing prices up is the consistently constrained supply enforced by overeager zoning and labyrinthine permitting processes.
lol. Yeah I’ve seen the argument they buy so little they don’t influence the market. I call BS. When I was buying my third home. I kept getting beat out by them. It took my a year to finally lock down my home.
I think they are buying more in the low end to middle
Market.
I’m sure there are many factors, but constructive (edit: constrictive) zoning plus rising population (ie rising demand) is itself sufficient to explain not only rising prices, but even accelerating price increases (since the demand curve isn’t linear).
Zoning issues is typical of blue states. California. Oregon has have heavy restrictions for legit reasons.
People don’t realize restrictions make sense. You can’t cram 50k people into an area without the sewage, water, roads, etc. there is a balance.
At one of my houses we have a restriction that each house must have 1 acre. It seems crazy till you learn most of that is an easement for electric and drainage. So while I have an acre. Most of it’s not useable. It’s just grass.
The other problem areas have with rapidly growing the population is all the infrastructure that has to grow with it. My area has added three schools in the last 5 years and are near capacity, tripled water and sewer capacity (some future proofing), are constantly widening roads. They've started slow rolling rezoning so they can catch up which has caused home prices to jump 10% more compared to the surrounding areas.