i have an abra w sync adamant <| sep |> I don ' t follow their pages so I didn ' t know that , thanks ! <| sep |> What is their possible 11 ? <| sep |> No , a house creates nothing of itself , can be used for nothing productive . Your argument would apply just as well to public monuments , which perhaps better illustrates the sterility of the effort . If a country were to plough money and credit into building public monuments , they could continue doing so until their landscape was entirely taken up with statuary , and the productive capacity of the economy would have increased by absolutely nothing at all . The same is true for houses . That ' s one of the reasons the housing bubble and its collapse was so damaging . All the effort and money put into houses from 19962006 added absolutely nothing to our economic capacity directly . When the bubble expectation that houses would always go up in value disappeared , so did all the notional wealth it had created , leaving the Irish public more heavily in debt than ever before , with no extra earning capacity to show for it . A house is an investment only if house prices are rising , and then only in a purely financial sense . From a business perspective and so from the perspective of the economy more broadly it is a dead weight . It ' s even poor as a store of value , since as you say it requires maintenance . The only real value of a house is to provide for the need for shelter in its widest sense , and once everyone has a shelter , the real value of further houses is nothing . Unfortunately , we have a housing market in which houses are treated as financial assets , leading to a situation where there are more houses than needed , yet not everyone has one . Highly perverse .