This is only relevant when rates are low. Rates are currently higher than the growth you can expect in housing prices.

I have done repeated financial models of this over the last 15 years and it has never made sense to buy a house for me.

When rates were low, if I had bought a house and then stayed in it a long enough time to counteract transaction costs, it could have been ok, but in expectation, basically everyone buying a house would have been better off investing the money from their downpayment & repayments into the stock market.

Transaction costs are killer and never factored in correctly, I’ve found.