Why on earth should the average person make an investment with significant leverage? The only reason, ever, to make an investment with leverage is if there is

Why on earth should the average person make an investment with significant leverage? The only reason, ever, to make an investment with leverage is if there is some arbitrage opportunity that requires a large amount of capital to make money from. But by definition, the average person is not going to be able to identify arbitrage opportunities in the housing market. The real reasons to invest in housing are: a) diversification (so not everything is in bonds or stocks) b) excellent tax treatment c) excellent political protection d) interest rates that are often lower than the monetary inflation rate (by monetary inflation rate I mean growth in M*V - nominal income growth). However, at this point, all the above factors are already capitalized into the price of housing. So at this point there is not much of an economic benefit to buying housing.