Home prices are going to start falling, and it's going to be a major shitshow for the country

[DFW]

52. This is mostly a completely foreign language to me

Never having bought a house in the USA, I have little idea what most of this means. My two siblings bought the houses that they live in decades ago, one in Virginia, one in new Jersey. We bought ours here in Germany for cash--I had saved most of what I earned up to then--, as the wildly fluctuating exchange rate (I am paid in dollars in the USA) was a risk I wasn't willing to bear. That was in the bull market of 1990, so it cost me a fortune, and the high-flying dollar-DM rate was long dead after the high interest rates in the USA fall off their astronomical highs.

My only vague contact with the current real estate market in the USA was hearing about my nephew in northern California. He, his wife and their 10 year old son live in a tiny apartment in Palo Alto, where he was in school, and stayed on. They recently saw a half duplex in Oakland with bay views. It was listed at $1.7 million, which they can't afford, but my brother is retired with virtually no expenses at all, and he offered to help. In light of the current craziness, the owner was entertaining seal offers, based upon, but not limited to, the asking price. My nephew offered $2 million, which terrified him in case it was accepted. Instead of accepting my nephew's offer, the owner got an offer of $2.15 million and cash outright, instead of the financing my nephew would have needed. My nephew wasn't even second or third.

I guess his quality of life would have improved, except for the daily worry of how he was going to both pay for his house and put food on the table. It sounds like insanity to me, but his job is in that area, and he wants to keep it.

I don't even pretend to get the situation over there, which is probably more like 500 different local situations, anyway. My one daughter that lives in the USA bought, with her husband, a really nice, and very spacious apartment in New York City at the height of the Corona crisis. They paid a price which is maybe between half and two thirds of what it would have cost them now.

I am SOOOO glad to not to have to deal with all this!