[brimble]

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)

[pavlov]

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.

[mywittyname]

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.