A house is a place to live

It's not an investment. It's a place to hang your hat. It's a place to keep your books. It's a place to keep your clothes. It's a place to eat. It's a place to sleep. It's a place to make love. It's a place to have fun. It's a place to be happy. It's a place to be sad. It is not an investment. Or as Charlie Brooker puts it:

For years, money was just appearing from nowhere, or so we were told. People bought houses and bragged about how the value kept zooming up, and up, and up. In fact they didn't seem to be houses at all, but magic coin-shitting machines. It was all a dream, a dream in which you bought a box and lived in it, and all the time it generated money like a cow generates farts. Great big stinking clouds of money. And none of it was real. And now it's gone.

All that was never real melts into a big cloud of nothingness.