Low mortgage rates are almost certainly propping up the RE market. Yet markets are uneven and have unfolded in a way I didn't really anticipate, though in hindsight it makes sense. Multi-family/small apartments in San Francisco proper and other downtowns? These seem to have cooled off, along with rents. Whereas across the bay in Alameda (mostly SFH on slightly larger lots) the market is hotter than ever. Places further out are also hot, such as Napa and other rural areas outside the Bay Area.
Interested to hear from folks near other large dense cities what their local RE market is doing.
I'll add my amateur armchair speculation to the mix: Some of the demand from city --> rural is from the ultra wealthy desperate to escape the shelter-in-place city life. This makes for sensational headlines, so of course media loves to report on it. But I'm thinking this isn't a huge (relatively speaking) number of people. It's pretty widely accepted that young adults like the city life, especially when dating and finding a SO, but things change once kids start to enter the picture. So at any given time there's a large-ish percentage of urbanites there for a period of time (college, building a career, padding resume, meeting SO, enjoying a fast paced social life, etc.) but plan on heading to the burbs or the country or a smaller city at some point in the next several years. Seems likely that, with most of the interesting stuff cities have on offer shut down and remote work now a possibility for the next 1 year or more, a lot of this demand for other places has been pulled forward. Why not make the move a year or two earlier than planned and exploit the wage arbitrage, while also having more room to roam while social distancing?
If this is accurate then, barring some other major disruption, I wouldn't expect a crash in RE prices in the burbs/rural/small cities in the short term. These are folks planning to stay put for the long haul. Though I would expect a leveling off of prices as the demand pulled forward should mean less than usual demand in the near future.