zlacker

Pricing moves at margins, not necessarily driven by totals. Ie. Pricing is primarily driven by the immediate demand and supply situation at a given time. Small changes in availability can have a dramatic effect. Good ways to understand this is to look at underlying data of auctions (richest in data) but pretty much any demand supply granular transaction data will show rhis. For eg. this is why small hoarding locally in emerging markets (where giant supermarkets will not immediately or easily truck in containers of products running short) also generates massive profits for traders.

Housing is of course a bit more complex - pricing is more sticky on the upside than downside (as home owners don't like to rent for less than before and may let units sit idle etc) and "instant" usually windows over weeks but fundamentally similar mechanics work. As an example, in Singapore, the government raised excise duty for non Singaporeans to purchase housing to 65% when housing became overheated. The number of rich foreigners buying property has always been small in absolute but was growing fast in rate as rich family money and bankers from Hong Kong started flowing to Singapore. Prices and also rentals across all classes of housing, not just the super premium properties favoured by the wealthy came down and people who had been pushed down at the margins into less than their preferred value housing (including ourselves) moved back up.