The actual history is a bit more complicated than that. There's what officially happened and then there was what happened with the massive black market. It became even more extreme towards the end of the collapse where many people essentially did almost all transactions on the black market. Real estate was of course harder to put on the black market, but could be sometimes accomplished via extreme bribery. It is noteworthy that the switch to a legitimate, private ownership system of real estate was so extreme culturally that there was a lot of trouble adjusting. See some of the discussion here(pdf).