No it wasn't. A rising market creates speculators, not the other way around.
Pass a law that says that, henceforth, you can only own one home at a time. What would happen? Homes would appreciate with population growth and money supply
Besides, rising and falling markets reflect organic supply and demand. Speculation is gambling and it continues until the money runs out (usually borrowed money). Speculation is the cause of all economic bubbles. They pop when the money stops.
I’ll have to beg to differ. In Las Vegas, a huge, previously underestimated component of the housing demand was speculators. What has made the market crush these speculators is the lack of rising valuations - the speculators listened too much to the realtors and ignored the actual stats. The partnership of politicians like Harry Reid gaming the BLM to release more land to development and Del Webbe building more homes at a torrid pace kept house price appreciation pretty well capped - there always seemed to be more than enough supply coming onto the market from big-scale development to keep the demand sated. The existence of interest-only loans made it possible for quite a number of long-term residents and Californians who had moved to Vegas with long-term cap gains on their Californian residence(s) to play speculator with high levels of leverage.
The conventional wisdom was that “you couldn’t go wrong buying housing in Vegas” because everywhere you turned, you always hear Vegas is “the fastest growing city in the US.” So there were lots of inexperienced newbie real estate speculators in the market, buying and holding houses empty, waiting for price appreciation to make them more than their interest-only investment in the property.
As a result, as the mortgage industry continues to implode, more and more housing is being flung onto the Vegas market. At the current long-term demand/consumption rates, there is more than two years of already built housing inventory currently on the market - and it continues to go up.