Everyone may have different results depending on region and personal circumastances, but I have a hard time believing interest rates are effecting home sales as drastically as thought.
While my personal situation is one of the ones effected, many are not. Just this week we got offered 400k cash on the house we rent....
Literally a dude walked to our house and made a cash offer. We have seen this guy around the neighborhood frequently and told him we rented it, we were not the owners. Turns out he was a wealth of info.
This dude doesnt give 2 fucks about interest rates. Pays cash and moves on. After doing a bit more research, this seems to be a hell of a lot more common that one would have thought and with mass exodus out of Cali / NY etc, these peeps are buying 5 homes for the cost of theirs 1 back home and still have cash left over.
He was tired of NY, covid effected his business, so his family moved. He sold his home for $1.9m ( his house was only 1200 sq feet. ) Moved to Indiana and saw homes for 300k that would be $3m + where he is from...so basically he bought 4 homes already for cash and looking to buy more for rentals. Within 2 months this 1 guy relocating from NY has purchased 25% of the homes on our street, for less than his 1 home in NY.
For sure rates are impacting the higher priced areas, likely not nearly as much in the lower priced areas for all the reasons cited above. A lot of people can plop down $400k cash for a new house as you say. Not a lot of people can afford to plop down $2 million in cash - they need to borrow, the higher rates are impacting those buyers and pushing prices down in those areas.