I suspect that real estate prices are dragged up by fear of inflation. People in my country buy whatever has a roof, because they do not want their savings to go to waste.
I just refinanced my house for a rate that is effectively negative in real terms right now.
I am sort-of familiar with real estate market in Prague and Ostrava, two very different cities.
Apartments in Ostrava were hard to sell even with low interest rates, because the city lost 10 per cent of its population - a typical rust belt phenomenon. Even just two years ago, an apartment put on market in Ostrava could be there for half a year before attracting a serious buyer.
They are now hot like hell and more than twice as much expensive.
It's also why you sometimes see a development with a several rows of houses meant for sale flanked by one or more apartment buildings with a far smaller footprint but enough floors to equal roughly the same usable area in order to get the project approved.
But it's also easy to see why for someone looking for rent in many big cities today it looks like most apartments are owned by big management companies. New developments in "hot" cities with high demand and such laws are owned by a management company because that's the only way it works. You'd see entire buildings owned by the developer. It will take decades for those new apartments to go into private ownership.
[0] https://www.thelocal.de/20210708/explained-munichs-radical-n...