Good point. Even if real estate prices going up everywhere wins me nothing, however, real estate prices going down always causes me a loss if I've purchased a h

Good point. Even if real estate prices going up everywhere wins me nothing, however, real estate prices going down always causes me a loss if I've purchased a house with borrowed money. For instance, if I borrow $500k to buy a house, and its value soon after falls to $300k, I still owe the bank 500k yet my assets are only worth $300k, meaning my net worth is down by $200k. If I was renting this wouldn't happen. I think culturally there's too much willingness to buy houses with borrowed money. The proverbial average Joe wouldn't leverage themselves to buy any other investment worth hundreds of thousands with borrowed money, yet it's seen as perfectly reasonable to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy a house. The inherent risk involved in investing a large sum of borrowed money just seems to be ignored, and then people do everything they can to keep house prices rising in order to avoid this risk materialising.