Well if you look at bay area real estate since 1984, if you buy 1 or 2 years before the peak, it never drops below the point 1 year before the peak occurred. Except on the 2007 US real estate bubble pop, which was 2 years.

Then you have places where I am from, like Vancouver, for which the past ~15 years has been rising quite a bit, and now staying at very high price levels. $1 million dollar houses are pretty average, and whats even worse is people don't make nearly enough income to live there.

So this recent rise is pretty worrying from my perspective. If I want to buy a place, my savings will be wiped out. I personally wish it didn't cost so much.

People keep using the word "never" and "always" to describe periods of time that are relatively short.

We wouldn't say "never" with a sample size of 5 in any other scenario, but with finance we seem to look at small samples and confidently say things like always and never.

How does this make any sense?

I qualified my use of never with a specific time span. Within that period of time you never see X. Any other word I could think of would just be more complicated and thus harder to read.

And my timespan was 31 years. That is after several booms and busts. If the pattern holds for even a decade +, that is a pretty significant part of my life span and something I have to consider.

Also on a more personal note, my father was basically forced out of Vancouver due to not buying a house when he had the chance 10 years ago, so it's a very real possibility that I might be forced out too here.

So the reason why people use 'small' samples is because those timespans are not small for a human being!