In practice, the main advantage of buying used to be that it represented a form of forced saving, allowing you to build up your patrimony. But with interest-only, 2/28, resettable and other fancy loans where you paid almost exclusively interest, the borrowers did not accumulate any equity unless there was a price increase... but they were on the hook for asset value losses.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes