In Argentina and most of Latin America for example, most real estate purchases are done with cash. Thus, in order to buy land you have to save for years till you have the full purchase price. The cost of renting is much higher vs the land value. Less credit = lower prices. Profits and savings from productive businesses and wages have much more power in the economy than bank loans.
It's a bit like what happened to higher education in the U.S. We rapidly increased the amount of loans available and the costs skyrocketed. Same goes for the housing bubble. You increase the credit available for houses, the price goes up. You decrease it, the price goes down. This is the game we play with money in this country because everyone will always take our dollars and we can QE as many as we want.
There's a lot of arbitrage of this via buying real estate in foreign countries. Lots of retirees sell their inflated home and buy in Costa Rica and all that money drives up the prices there. We've got the dollar spigot in this country and everyone else in the world has to drink off what leaks out the trade deficit.
It's a global game and the people who have made tons of money off that game go and manufacture stuff in China for impossibly cheap where the leaky dollar spigot has not deluged and import it back to the U.S. This is where the whole export led economy thing comes from. If you are a publicly traded company in the U.S, you get to benefit from the enormous amounts of dollar spigot that floods into the S&P 500 via the banks diversifying after they receiving money from the Fed's purchase of MBSs from the banks, that then get parsimoniously dolled out to factories in Asia and elsewhere by these big companies.