I think you're on to something here. My local anecdote - a few of my realtor friends said roughly 70% of all transactions in the last two years in Santa Barbar

I think you're on to something here. My local anecdote - a few of my realtor friends said roughly 70% of all transactions in the last two years in Santa Barbara area have been cash deals. They also said currently those deals are all dried up. From what little research I've put into it, from the county assessors office it looks like 2.5k homes were sold last year in the area. Now think about this, we had an overwhelming number of people from LA and SF flee to Santa Barbara during the pandemic. How many of those people had temporarily won the stock option start-up lottery, ie. any tech bubble employee - zoom, pelaton, doordash, etc, or had a house that had spiked in value willing and was willing to swap homes. It doesn't take much when housing supply is at historic low and temporary bubble demand skyrocketed to throw the market all out of whack. Personally, I know at least 10 people that traded their zoom stock for all cash housing deals here in SB at the right time. Now that stock is worth 1/8 of what is was. I imagine that this scenario played out a few hundred times just in our little town. Extrapolate that nationwide, you can see what might have contributed to massive asset valuations that quite literally, don't make sense. In the long run, it shouldn't matter, however it will be fun to watch it all play out.