Any time a "bust" happens it allows capital to consolidate more wealth.

My goto indicator is that.. all news media writes this kind of article "market crash", "housing bubble", "inflation" every 3 to 5 weeks like clockwork. "We spoke with some analyst somewhere who says we MAY BE seeing a shift in blah blah.". What I look out for is more affirmative reports like "Pelosy and Romney just pump and dumped most of their pharma stocks as pandemic accelerates!" ya dig.

If CNBC is reporting a housing bubble, they're either wrong or it's already burst. The media is never in front of these things. They are incapable of seeing outside the bubble because they are in it. Bad events are always over-estimated. I know it feels like the opposite, that capitalists have a rosy view of the economy, but the media always says bad things on the verge of happening. They're seeking engagement and fear is a good tool for engagement.

People always over-estimate volatility. This means they think good and bad events count for more than they do. People look at the rent moratoriums and assume that it will have a major, industry-ending affect on the market. But they do that with everything. They do it all the time. If you say it's going to rain eventually you will be correct. A lot of people, since 2008, have become doomsayers. Because the few people who saw 2008 coming got incredibly rich and are still respected to this day for being smart. People just say bad things are always going to happen on the hopes they'll eventually be correct.

A bubble is when an asset is priced way higher than its value. We've seen housing prices steeply increase over the past couple years. Therefore there must be a bubble! Housing has been priced above its fundamental value for quite a while. The whole point of home ownership is to build equity, which means your house increases in value over time. That's how boomers are able to retire with millions. If someone buys a house in the 70s for $30k and now it's worth $1M, is that a giant bubble? Of course not. It's how the increase is absorbed. Prices can go up forever as long as there are both buyers and sellers. Prices have steeply increased but there are supposed inventory shortages right now. That means there's not enough buying and too much selling. As soon as there is selling, it's immediately bought at market prices. It's a problem when people stop buying. When housing is too expensive for investors, the bubble will burst. But how do we know housing is too expensive for investors? We don't. It's like trying to predict the top of a stock price. We will only know once the bubble bursts. Blackrock just spend all of last year buying up housing at market prices. Tons of people are trying to get into real-estate investing despite it being more expensive. Lower tier investors are being priced out, but that's not a bubble. It could be the start of a bubble. Or it could be the new normal where the petite-bourgeois are just shit out of luck and they must join the proles down here in "lifetime renter" territory. They have a lot of sway with the media, so of course they would view it as a bubble.

Higher interest rates means less free-flowing capital for investing. It doesn't mean investing stops. it just prices people out. So like #3, it could be a sign of a bubble about to burst or it could just be poorer investors not getting a seat on the gravy train.

There's a symmetry here with stonks and crypto. Under the pandemic there was a lot of ways to get into these investments which fueled a bull run. People got richer and assumed it was their savvy that did it. But now that the money printer costs a little more, they can't hang and are losing their asses. They're in a new reality they didn't see coming and don't understand why. Stocks are now more expensive to to buy and will probably produce fewer returns for the foreseeable future. They're priced out of being day traders and investment opportunities. Crypto too. It boomed and then busted. Housing is probably the same way, just lagging behind. It might boom for another few months, or years. But it's definitely going to be more expensive and return less. This means only the biggest investors can afford it, and that reduces their competition. Hence them buying it up. I guess when Blackrock starts unloading their real-estate positions, the bubble is bursting.

This is all anecdotal, my partner and I have been trying to find a condo for a few months. The housing bubble has not burst, nor is it close to. There are still more buyers with money (especially funds like black rock, HENRYs, local landlords) than there are available (good) housing stock. That pushes prices up and into a looney realm (no inspection, all cash, escalation clauses, to name three of many things we've heard about in offers). Even though interest rates are raising now (they've gone up a point the last month), they are still historically low and no one we've spoken to in the real estate business expects them to ever get too high again (say 10%). They all expect them to get back to zero in the medium term. For us that means even if we were to buy with a very disadvantageous rate (say 7%), we could expect to refinance with a rate in the 2-3% range in the next few years.

Until housing stock increases or the long term outlook gets worse, we're kind of screwed.

Not enough new housing is built, and the few new builds get snapped up by investment groups and rental companies. Any old house hitting the market is in a tug of war between the companies , house flippers, and the odd millennials looking to buy a home. You also have huge swathes of housing being wiped out by freak weather events every year now; fires, flooding, derecho's and tornado's ect.

I don't think it's a bubble.

Bro nobody knows economics on this website

a housing bubble means housing prices are far above what the "logic" of the market can defend, let alone any material basis.

bubbles, under capitalist ideology, are driven by speculators leveraging debt, making them unstable and prone to "softening", "deflating" or, in the worst case "bursting". this would be driven by less credit being available for purchasing homes, making them hard to sell and slowing the pace of price increases... so they become less attractive as a speculative asset. basically, this is an instance of deflating/softening.

bursting would imply the failure of loans on a bunch of already purchased homes, so this would mean banks failing/home foreclosures, and this radiating out to affect other types of credit access that would maybe shutter businesses seemingly unrelated to housing, increasing unemployment, reducing tax revenues, and driving down home prices.

this can have a knock on negative effect for people close to retirement, public sector employment, and result in people who owe more on their house than they could sell it for. it wouldn't be permanent, but people/corporations with lots of cash could make a killing buying up whatever they can during the bankruptcies. basically, this happened after 2008 and concentrated wealth into even fewer hands.

No, because billionaires exist and can buy up all the housing without even thinking twice about it. “Supply and demand” does not apply here.

idk

idk but it feels like they're trying to make it so that no one can own anything ever again

Also, related, I remember reading a while ago about a similar hypothetical bubble for student loan debt, but I wasn't able to find much when I tried googling it recently. Does anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?

Maybe

Yes since 1976.