UNDR8D
...has a job!
Yeah. Your'e right. Its much better to live in someone else's house and pay them the rent, so instead of investing money over time, you're just tossing it out the window.
No, A home's value on average, increases at the normal rate of inflation, which is 3-4%. After property taxes, interest, and maintenance, the effective rate becomes closer to 1%. Consider then then that most people upgrade and move before they ever really own a piece of property and the effective rate sinks even further into fractions of a percent. There's nothing wrong with owning a house but it isn't the "investment" that banks and other lending institutions want you to think it is.