> If I am not mistaken 30% of buyers are cash buyers, hence they do not care about the mortgage rate.

Not necessarily. For anyone who's been working at FAANG and amassed certain amount of financial independence, the advice generally ran along the following scenario:

1) Secure a pledged-asset loan against your stock portfolio. That reduces the need to sell anything and trigger capital gains.

2) Shop around for real estate and submit a cash based offer to signal that you can close quickly.

3) Finalize the transaction.

4) Shop around cashout refi loans with fixed rates. Refi. Cashout. Repay the asset-backed loan.

If those 30% who are cash buyers kept their cash locked up in their houses, you wouldn't see household mortgage debt (that includes refi) skyrocket https://www.emarketer.com/newsroom/index.php/us-mortgage-deb...

Many of the cash buyers are either proxies (Ribbon, etc) or turn right around and get a mortgage. One of the touted benefits of real estate is enhanced leverage with equity as the collateral. "Cash" on an offer is more of a waiver of financing contingency, it does sound cool though.

Exactly this.

Too many people seem to think 'cash deals' in real estate equate to a guy showing up with a louis vutton bag full of 100s that's been collecting dust in their shoe closet

It's just an indication of a lack of nuance in the deal-making, lack of contingencies (i.e. I'll give you $XYZ for your house as soon as I get $ABC for my house - agreed?!)

"Cash buyers" may very well have a mortgage, but they have enough assets/collateral that the bank is willing to give them carte blanche (ie the bank will waive inspection, because if there is a major flaw that makes the house uninhabitable, they'll just collect some other asset of yours).

I disagree. Until now there might have been 30% buyers with cash, but with rising interest rates that will stop being the case if house prices stay up.

People with large sums of spare money always look for ways to park their money. Interest based products (term deposits, bonds etc.) will now become more attractive, diverting some cash flows away from housing.

Alternatively with interest rates higher, buyers might think they can't get a higher return than the interest rate on the mortgage, thus lowering the opportunity cost of paying all in cash.

The interest on most interest based products will not rise as fast as inflation and so I'm not sure they will be "more attractive" (at least compared to real assets).

A 70% drop in demand would crater the marginal price of homes by over 70%.

Why would anyone pay cash for a house when even a horrendous mortgage rate is still only 6%? That cash is earning 10% easily with zero effort. Put 15 minutes of effort in and open a Betterment account and you’re likely getting closer to 20%. Cash buyers make no sense to me.

"Just get 20% returns easily" LOL! The fact that you would not only think that type of return is consistent and "easy", but literally think that you should go into debt betting on that, is laughable. If it was guaranteed money, everyone would be doing it.

20% return from Betterment? That’s hyperbole right? I have a betterment account and it’s nowhere close to that.

What are you getting? Are you looking at time weighted or money weighted? I just checked and I’m getting an average of 21.6% across 7 different portfolios on betterment (annualized, not cumulative).

The highest is 8.8 which is time-weighted cumulative, annualized is far worse at 2.2 for time weighted

Because they aren't just sitting on the house, they are cashing out after buying and also taking advantage of the market with that money.

Have you checked your portfolio lately?

Yes, and that’s even more of a reason to be putting extra money into the market if you have a ten year+ time horizon.

I'd reference the Nikkei 225 circa 1990 [1]. That graph is not inflation adjusted. Up to 1990 everybody thought Japan was well on its way to becoming the world's largest economy on an exponential and unstoppable economic acceleration. And it was unstoppable. Then it stopped.

I am not saying this will be the case, but rather that we're at what is likely the largest inflection point in modern history, and trying to predict where the world will be at in 10 years has become effectively impossible.

[1] - https://www.macrotrends.net/2593/nikkei-225-index-historical...