Why I’ve Never Felt the Need to Buy a House

I’ve never felt the need to buy a house, and real estate investing has always been somewhat incomprehensible to me. I fully respect that, for many people, it represents a legitimate lifestyle choice, but it is clearly far removed from my own way of thinking. I also don’t consider it particularly sensible from a financial perspective, though I would limit myself to a few simple observations.

1. Instinctively, the only value I attribute to a property is its use value. In other words: how many years do I expect to live in that house, and how much would I otherwise pay in rent? To me, housing is essentially a commodity – like electricity or gas. Of course I need a roof over my head, but beyond that basic calculation, I struggle to assign any meaningful value to a property. You could show me any house and say it’s worth X, and I would have no real basis to judge whether that number makes sense. Honestly, you could name almost any figure.
2. Locking up a large amount of capital that could otherwise generate a steady stream of income – say, if invested in stocks – has always seemed like a poor trade-off to me. Yes, property values tend to rise over time and rental income is possible, but that comes with significant costs, responsibilities, and friction. Buying stocks, by contrast, means investing in the productive progress of society. Real estate, in comparison, feels like an essentially inert asset, often just passed from one generation to the next.
3. I also dislike illiquid investments. I believe they contain a level of hidden risk that few people would accept if it were fully visible. A house, after all, cannot be moved, which introduces a clear form of country risk. What happens if a government decides that your ideas aren’t acceptable and targets your property? The COVID period demonstrated how quickly extraordinary measures can appear and how rapidly the rules of the game can change.
4. Finally, I’m wary of markets that rely heavily on leverage. They carry a persistent systemic risk that I prefer to avoid. As the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated, real estate can sit at the center of major economic disruptions and tends to be one of the slowest markets to recover afterward. In such situations, liquidity disappears quickly, and turning property into cash can require accepting deeply discounted prices.

The use-value framing is the strongest move here – most people arguing for homeownership are actually arguing for a psychological comfort they’ve dressed up as finance. Stripping it back to “rent equivalent over expected years of use” cuts through a lot of noise, and the comparison to electricity is deliberately brutal in the right way.

That said, a few things deserve pushback.

The stock market liquidity argument cuts both ways. Yes, you can sell equities in seconds – but that same liquidity is precisely what makes people panic-sell at the worst possible moment. Real estate’s illiquidity, perversely, has a behavioral finance upside: it forces holding. Most retail investors who think they’re disciplined aren’t, and the data on actual investor returns versus index returns confirms this consistently. The friction you’re criticizing might be doing more work than you’re giving it credit for.

The country risk point is interesting but slightly inconsistent with the overall logic. If a government is confiscating property, equities listed in that jurisdiction aren’t exactly safe harbor either.

And if we’re talking about capital controls or asset freezes, financial instruments often get targeted first – they’re easier to block. The argument works better as a general case for geographic diversification than as a specific indictment of real estate versus stocks.

The leverage critique is fair, but it applies to the market, not necessarily to an individual who buys with little or no leverage. Conflating systemic risk with personal investment risk is a subtle category error. The 2008 crisis was fundamentally a leverage crisis, not a real estate crisis per se.

Where you’re on solid ground: the productivity argument. Equities represent claims on human ingenuity and compounding enterprise value. Real estate, at its core, is a bet on scarcity and geography – fundamentally different engines, and arguably less interesting ones over long horizons.

Final question worth sitting with: if property is essentially a commodity to you, why do equities feel categorically different? A share of a REIT is liquid, scalable, and gives you real estate exposure without the friction – and yet it presumably doesn’t trigger the same instinctive resistance. Is the aversion actually financial, or is it aesthetic?