My country's population has been in slow decline since the late 90s, with very little(~1%) change over the 20 years before the pandemic - of course plenty of people moved out, but they didn't bother to report that so that's just the official number.
Prices still went up before the 2008 crisis at the same pace as in the rest of the world and started going up in the latter part of the previous decade - exactly like in the rest of the world.
All that despite record-breaking construction.
There's no realistic explanation of this that doesn't involve treating real estate as a commodity.
People are moving from poor areas to rich areas, from villages to cities, which is actually bad for both cities (overpopulation) and villages (dying out). Half of my parents' village is just empty houses. Meanwhile prices in the city 2h drive away are unimaginably high.
Look at detailed population density map of any developed country across time. Nobody wants to live in villages, everyone comes to big cities, preferably the capital.
Thing is, over here the urbanization rate peaked at 62% in the late 90s and also started declining because people increasingly moved out of cities into the suburbs due to the sheer inability to get a mortgage on any city property.
Despite that prices went up across the board.
The most egregious example this is a city(Łódź, Poland) which between 1995 and 2020 went from 823k inhabitants to 658k at a steady pace, all while prices going into overdrive mid last decade.
There's clearly little demand from people who actually intend to live in the homes they purchased and government statistics confirm that.
My country's population has been in slow decline since the late 90s, with very little(~1%) change over the 20 years before the pandemic - of course plenty of people moved out, but they didn't bother to report that so that's just the official number.
Prices still went up before the 2008 crisis at the same pace as in the rest of the world and started going up in the latter part of the previous decade - exactly like in the rest of the world.
All that despite record-breaking construction.
There's no realistic explanation of this that doesn't involve treating real estate as a commodity.