The little transactions in life have been a problem in recent months.

Toilet paper. Yeast. Ground beef. Coronavirus lockdowns didn’t just it make hard to get to the store. It made them hard to find what you wanted when you got there in some cases.

That’s settling back into a more normal pattern. You can find your Charmin again. Retailers expect hamburger prices and availability to relax as supply chain issues are resolved.

But those are just the everyday purchases.

What about the kind of deals you make once or twice in a lifetime?

Well, those are getting back to business as usual, too.

According to area real estate professionals, after months of quarantine that made seeing and showing property — much less buying and selling it — a huge challenge, houses now are selling like hotcakes.

May real estate purchasing wasn’t just up over those lockdown months. It was up 13% over May 2019 sales.

“It’s the hottest market I have ever seen,” said Tom Hosack, president and CEO of the McCandless-based Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and president of West Penn Multi-List.

And that says a lot about where people want to be heading.

There’s a lot of talk about the parade of would-be disasters that seem determined to one-up each other in 2020, but when you look at the real estate market, it doesn’t show people giving in to anxiety about where things are headed.

Buying a house isn’t something you do out of fear. Signing a mortgage may cause a little apprehension, but you do it because you have looked at your life, calculated your salary against your future plans and agreed that you can swing this payment — and all those other expenses of homeownership — for the next 15 or 20 or 30 years. Record-low mortgage rates, moreover, are making the calculations easier.

Homes are bought by people who are optimistic about what’s coming. They are people who are thinking about spending forever with a new spouse or getting more bedrooms because a new baby is on the way. They are purchased by people getting new jobs and pursuing new opportunities.

People aren’t buying bunkers. They are looking at three bedrooms with updated bathrooms and granite counters in the kitchen. They want stainless appliances and a nice lawn. Plenty of people have spent their quarantine time making the homes going on the market more appealing.

That shows sellers have optimism, too. They are also making smart investments in their community and their own net worth.

Spending money on new paint and tile and plants for the yard is a kind of two-for-one deal. It puts money into those home improvement businesses, which then goes into paychecks and from there to all those little everyday transactions.

But it also increases the value of the home at a time when houses are flying off the shelves.

Apparently there is no better way to spend your money than on the idea of the world carrying on after 2020.

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