>You're leveraged 5x (say), so you get 5x as much growth. Just pulling numbers out of nowhere, let's imagine you buy a $200k house with 40k down; after ten years the house is worth a nominal $400k which is $300k in today's dollars. You've gained 100k on your initial 40k, whereas if you'd invested the $40k in the stock market at the same rate of return you'd only have made 20k.

Your numbers work out because you made them up. The obvious problems:

In most of the country, a $200K house going up to $400K in 10 years is very unlikely. I live in a hot market. I compared the inflation adjusted change in value over 20 years, and it's about 1-2% above inflation. It's unlikely your $200K home will be worth $300K in today's dollars.

The rate of return of the stock market is considerably higher than real estate (over, say, 20 years). So assuming the "same rate of return" is a really bad assumption! Even right before the crash in 2008, over a 20 year period, stocks did better than real estate. I wonder if there is any 30 year period where stocks did not do better!

I'm not in the "renting is better" camp. However, for most people, the leverage will not work out (it has for me, but I just got lucky).