Though real estate has gone up on average for the last several decades, this has not always been true as you can see from historical data. [1] [2] [3]

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwake/2019/03/30/new-study-o... "Old Real Estate Bubbles (1582-1810)"

[2]: https://globalfinancialdata.com/seven-centuries-of-real-esta... "Seven Centuries of Real Estate Prices"

[3]: https://observationsandnotes.blogspot.com/2011/07/housing-pr... "100 Years of Inflation-Adjusted Housing Price History"

([3] is inflation-adjusted. For [2] see the second chart for inflation-adjusted prices. [1] is not inflation-adjusted but there wasn’t much inflation in Amsterdam back then.)

On average they always go up. However, with their upswing comes the occasional big downswings.

This is why having a good asset mix is important. You shouldn't have no stocks, because they have really good returns on average. But on the flip side, having only stocks is somewhat risky because it's impossible to tell if you are buying on the topside or bottom side of a bubble.

> Don't they always go up on average though?

It's not too far off to say that, in the long term, their real value does not go up, they just track inflation. Of course in recent years we live in Weird Times financially.

https://www.multpl.com/case-shiller-home-price-index-inflati...

All markets stop eventually. There's no natural law saying they need to go up forever.

Maybe you think they should keep going up, for whatever reason, and you might be right. But that's different than the fact that they increased on average in the past.

That was with a large injection of money though. Maybe they will do the same thing next time, maybe not. Maybe it will have the same effect, maybe not. No one really knows.