This is unusual since real estate is typically not very liquid, or at least wasn't considered to be liquid ‘enough’ and typically earns rates of return (net of maintenance) and had high opportunity costs (much how cigarettes in POW camps can only serve as currency if the prisoner decides not to actually smoke them, homes owned by those who dwell in them are not available for liquidation).
You'd be hard pressed to find many economists (or other well-informed individuals) who would consider real estate a currency. Though at some point we're just debating semantics.
Edit: Also, real estate is extremely non-fungible, as individual instances of the asset class are not easily interchangeable.
It's a value store, but hardly a currency.
When we had the gold standard in the US, gold was not our currency. It was the asset backing our currency (strictly speaking, you weren't going to go into a corner store with $0.10 worth of gold to pay for your bottle of coke, though I suppose you could've). Gold is simply too impractical to use as the currency directly. You have to back something like that with certificates. IN the case of a commodity like gold it's easy to accumulate those certificates into an amount that's actually worth exchanging for raw gold. But with real estate? How am I going to practically claim 100 sq ft of prime lakeside real estate?
OP might mean that Real Estate has become a leading store of value, on par with currency, due to the factors he outlines.
* QE was tremendously inflationary for all asset prices, including real estate prices which are not called "consumer prices" but it's not that easy to buy the argument behind it. Certainly for a lot of folks, real estate is their biggest expense, and it's very frightening to rent and not buy while housing prices go up all around you and you try to guess how far the cost of owning will become detached from the cost of renting. We can call people scared into buying overpriced houses "investors", but to me it's a bit of a stretch.
* Grandparent calls real estate, of all the asset classes inflated by QE, the new currency.
* You then, without agreeing with the grandparent, say QE isn't inflationary, as "understood" by many economists long ago. But if we stop calling houses "currency", is QE really not inflationary then? (I seriously don't think I fully understand it, BTW... So an honest question.)