Because you're looking at the USA market as a whole. The regional view tells a much better story because then you don't have movement in one region offset that

Because you're looking at the USA market as a whole. The regional view tells a much better story because then you don't have movement in one region offset that of other ones. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=MSPNE,MSPMW,MSPS,MSPW https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=MSPNE,MSPMW,MSPS,MSPW, You can pretty clearly see that most regions there were long periods of housing stagnation and decline, followed by quick price jumps, then back to stagnation. And look at how wildly the NE region fluctuates. It regularly moves 10% up or down in any given year. And sometimes much more, prices moved from $403k to 566k in one year (2016->2017). Whether you did well or not in your housing purchase comes down to luck. Yeah, in aggregate, over long enough time periods, housing does well. But your individual situation will vary dramatically.