The reasons: Real-estate is capital intensive. The aggregate real-estate value in a small city is billions of dollars. Real-estate timelines are long. Think t

The reasons: Real-estate is capital intensive. The aggregate real-estate value in a small city is billions of dollars. Real-estate timelines are long. Think thirty year mortgages. Scarcity of desirable locations. Manhattan Kansas apartments are not fungible with big apple Manhattan apartments. At scale real-estate is primarily used as a vehicle for wealth retention not wealth growth. If you have a few billion dollars, your problem isn’t scraping up a nickel for a hamburger. It’s finding someplace to store all that money (it won’t fit in your mattress). So the real-estate market is bivalent. The low end ranges from people just trying to get by to people trying to make money. The high end is real wealth with no incentive to sell in ordinary circumstances…what to do with a few billion in cash? is a real problem. And again, a few billion can move a local market, but not a regional one.