It's admittedly a small sample range, but if I'd taken this advice when I started buying houses around '09 (never more than 1 at a time, but I've moved just about every two years since then), I'd be at least $250,000 poorer. And I didn't come anywhere near optimizing for profit—it's mostly been happenstance and the fact that houses just keep going up in price, plus an initial bump from coming in right after the housing bubble burst (though house prices around here never got down to where they "should" have been if they'd tracked inflation since the start of the bubble, and only seemed cheap relative to the peak). I also started with one hell of a lot less capital than, say, a FAANG employee ought to be able to save in a couple years. Think, like, $25,000.

("But you could have invested that money instead and the market's gone crazy over that same time span, so maybe you actually lost money, opportunity-cost wise!" sure, but not really, since rent exceeds TCO for houses in my area so I'd have just bled money to that in exchange for no equity whatsoever and probably living somewhere worse)

You started buying at the bottom though.

For another data point, the Manhattan apartment which I'm renting was recently sold. The previous landlord had purchased it in 2016 for $200k higher than the sale price now, over five years later.

I'm renting because I know I'll be moving again within the year. If I had bought a place in NYC when I moved here, I'd have lost a lot more money than I've paid in rent.

The opposite was statistically much more likely to happen. The high transaction costs alone are enough to eat up any "profits". But the risk of buying a dud goes up as you move more frequently. Etc.

Your outcome is pretty close to a best case scenario. And I'm happy for you that things went so swimmingly.

The main question for any investment, ever, should be: you have some amount of money...what will net you the highest return on that money. You can modify this with considerations for risk and diversification, but the name of the game is always opportunity cost.

People stop thinking about opportunity cost when it comes to housing for some reason because they just can't stop thinking of paying rent as "throwing away money," without understanding that you're always throwing away money.

To take a simple example, let's say that you have $500k in cash.

Scenario 1: you pay $50k per year in rent from salary, park that $500k in a $2M investment property that returns $85k in rental returns. In this scenario, your returns are property appreciation and rental income. Your costs are mortgage, property tax, home insurance, home repair, and the rent you pay.

Scenario 2: you pay $0 per year in rent from salary, park that $500k in a $2M property that you live in that returns $0 in rental returns (because you live there). In this scenario, your returns are property appreciation. Your costs are mortgage, property tax, home insurance, home repair.

It's entirely possible, and common, for these scenarios to work out to be exactly the same. If you prioritize the purchase of properties that yield very high rents compared to the property value, it's very common for the numbers to work out in favor of owning investment property. And that can include "throwing away" money on rent.

TL;DR: you're never not renting. Even if you pay $0 in rent, the price you pay is the opportunity cost of not renting your house, and not maximizing returns on the money you've parked in it.