I keep hearing the foreign money story, but I can't really find much evidence of it. (I'm currently in SV; touring properties and talking to RE agents nearly every weekend.) I'm not saying it's 0% of the transactions, but I'd be really surprised if it were even 5%.

I'm going to temporarily ignore the "superexpensive" properties, which I'll arbitrarily define as over $4M in SV. That's a different market... for the "global jet-set." Or the people who were the first X employees at a startup with a real liquidity event (and their founders treated them fairly).

Down on the valley floor, $1-3M is within reach of a lot of people in tech, especially double techies. (If you've been here since before the last 2 booms, you've got even more going for you.) Most big tech companies (FANG) stock is way up... Take that as a downpayment... multiple it 2,3, or 4 times and voila.

Markets that have really been hit by foreign money are Vancouver [1] and certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles [2].

Having been to those places (for extended periods of time), I can say SV doesn't feel like those to me.

One last bit of anecdata: I know of one house in SV that received at least 7 offers in the past month. Only 1 of those 7 was all cash foreign money... but they weren't the high bid. 5 other "locals" with loans had higher offers.

[1] https://betterdwelling.com/city/vancouver/foreign-buyers-45-...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-15/chinese-h...

What you are saying actually makes sense. A friend who was trying to buy a home once told me, the homes more or less were instantly bought when put for sale on places like redfin, before they(remainder of the crowd wanting to buy) could arrange for mortgage. Indicating that some body had all the cash to make it a straight pay-and-buy deal.