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You should clarify "buy a house". If you are buying a house for yourself to live in, than no that is not an investment. An investment is when you "invest" money into something that will make you money back, not cost you money.
There are 3 ways to make money off of realestate, renting, building, and fixing up and fliping. Renting is easy enough, you factor in your down payment, all your expenses (included calculating so much a month for a new roof you will need 10 years from now, a new ac you will need 5 years from now, vacancy, etc..) also calculate your interest as a deduction, and base all of this off of what you can rent it for. If you are happy with the return then it is a good investment.
Building is simple enough, cost vs sale price.
Fixing and flipping is basically the same as building. The problem with flipping is too many people base their profit off of the market appreciating, and in most cases they always factor too little when estimating the cost to do repairs, and the value of their time if they are doing some of the repairs themself. I would never buy a house to flip that I could not make money off of if I got stuck with it. Meaning, that if the market tanked and I couldn't sell it for more than what I had invested into it I would make sure the rental I could get from it would more than cover the note and make me at least a decent return. You are crazy if you buy say a 300K home and thinking well I can put 50K into it and in 6 months I should be able to sell it for 400K. 9 months later you have 75K into the house (375K total) the market shifted and your house is now worth max 325K and you either fire sale it and lose 50K or you get stuck trying to rent it for 1200K a month and you still left coming up with $800 a month to cover the note. not wise. IMO fixing and flipping is great for the small crap houses, that you can get dirt cheap, because your risk is less, your profit % is greater and you can always rent them and at least cover your note.
The wild card in everything is appreciation/depreciation.
Back to buying a home for yourself, say you buy your own home, a house for 500K and put down 20%, 100K but you bought real high and the market burst, readjusts and now your property is worth 20% less. You just lost your equaity and you owe exactly what your property is worth.
Some people think, well i paid 500K for my house 10 years ago and now it is worth 550K so it was a 50K investment. Well if you deduct all that intrest you been paying then there is no way you will see a profit. Besided the occasional boom here and there, over time you property is not likely to appreciate more than your interest rate. UNLESS you keep it for a long time, than you can possibly realize a profit from appreciation. It's the way the intrest works on loans that kills you, you pay so much back in intrest up front there is no way appreciation will out pace that unless the market totally booms, which doesn't happen often.
I didn't read any of the 4 pages here so forgive me if I repeated stuff that has already been said.
Buying your own home is in no way an investment, it is just smart thing to do instead of throwing your money away renting. You have to do the math, in some cases renting makes more sense financially then buying but in most cases it is better to buy.
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