This is slightly less effective now that interest rates have come up some, but for people who bought at like 2% in the 2010s, yeah: it was basically just the bank (and government) funding the most profitable investment possible for you with no downside or risk at all. That’s how a lot of boomers see their house.
That other half of this “trick” is to then leverage your (now more valuable) asset to buy another house and rent it out. You take your $100,000 in profit that you made from sitting on your “asset,” pull it out, and use it as the down payment on another property, then get some poor desperate person to pay the mortgage on that while you pocket the appreciation and get the property at the end. The faster prices go up, the easier it is for people who already have their foot in the door to just keep doing that over and over. It’s braindead easy if you have no soul.
This is slightly less effective now that interest rates have come up some, but for people who bought at like 2% in the 2010s, yeah: it was basically just the bank (and government) funding the most profitable investment possible for you with no downside or risk at all. That’s how a lot of boomers see their house.
That other half of this “trick” is to then leverage your (now more valuable) asset to buy another house and rent it out. You take your $100,000 in profit that you made from sitting on your “asset,” pull it out, and use it as the down payment on another property, then get some poor desperate person to pay the mortgage on that while you pocket the appreciation and get the property at the end. The faster prices go up, the easier it is for people who already have their foot in the door to just keep doing that over and over. It’s braindead easy if you have no soul.