You all are fundamentally missing something with real estate pricing increasing, and that's how it's used for money laundering.
You know how you can sell a piece of art to someone for any price and how that gets used for money laundering? Well, the rich do that with houses and property too. Hint: a lot of real estate agents aren't really working as real estate agents. They are someone's escort or drug dealer etc who gets payment in the form of a cut of the property they "sold," but in reality was a pre-planned transaction that didn't really need real estate agents to facilitate.
So basically they are subsidizing illegal activity with our properties.
Oh, they talk about it in the documentary Active Measures (2018) when discussing Donald Trump doing it with commercial real estate and iirc, the mob/mafia. McCain and Hillary Clinton are in that doc. I'm looking for a link to the full documentary and will update this comment if I find it.
I couldn't find the free full (legal) version on YT anymore. It was free about a month ago. Sorry about that. You can of course find it through the usual other means
Well, I lived near a mn+ per year broker and he was sketchy. One of his clients was eventually convicted for tax evasion and got ten years, so while I didn't ask a lot of questions, I did always wonder. I was just wondering the potential mechanisms. Thanks. I'll sort something.