Exactly. The house/real estate isn't the currency, it's the asset backing the currency.

When we had the gold standard in the US, gold was not our currency. It was the asset backing our currency (strictly speaking, you weren't going to go into a corner store with $0.10 worth of gold to pay for your bottle of coke, though I suppose you could've). Gold is simply too impractical to use as the currency directly. You have to back something like that with certificates. IN the case of a commodity like gold it's easy to accumulate those certificates into an amount that's actually worth exchanging for raw gold. But with real estate? How am I going to practically claim 100 sq ft of prime lakeside real estate?

Quite amusingly the Weimar Republic quelled hyperinflation by rebasing the deflated currency on a limited asset... land. The new mark stabilised (until the Wall Street Crash, at least).