That is a valid issue that you raise, but unrelated to the conceptual issue of whether an increase in the nominal price of an asset can be coherently understood

That is a valid issue that you raise, but unrelated to the conceptual issue of whether an increase in the nominal price of an asset can be coherently understood to be a form of "inflation." Hopefully everyone on Hacker News is smart enough to know that housing has special features that are different from other asset classes.