While the housing bubble for anything but the ultra luxury segment has long since popped with $1.1 trillion of student loans playing a significant role in the burst, (as explained in "Stick A Fork In The "Housing Recovery"), as can be seen in the chart below which shows that the only increase in existing home sales from a year ago is that for the $500 and over price range (which accounts for only 10% of all actual transactions).... 

 

... when it comes to the luxury segment, things have moved beyond the simply bizarre and have entered outright surreal territory.

Case in point: San Francisco, where realtors have had to come up with a new term to explain what is happening when a house just sold for $600,000 above the $1.5 million asking price! The term: "overbid madness" and it explains well the buying frenzy that has engulfed the smallest portion of the housing market - that of the rarefied ultraluxury housing where the wealthy - almost exclusively offshore buyers - merely flip properties back and forth from each other without regard for price, comps or any other traditional valuation metrics.