Recently a lot of people at work have been talking about buying a place - I guess this is the stage where we are building our "foundation" for the future. It's interesting how people mix the rational and irrational aspects in the decision making process. It is true that the home can be most people's biggest (maybe even only) investment in life, and we want to make sure over time we are building equity and such. So a lot of people make their decisions based on "expected highest return on investment", take into account interest rate, housing prices, etc.. to build a forecast, etc.. That is critical for people were in the business of professional real estate investing.
But then to buy a place to live, realistically it's quite an emotional (and irrational) decision as well. Like I know people who just love the area so much that given rational choices they would not move. Some people would move really far from their normal perimeter to get cheaper housing or better investment. In reality, your cost is not just financial in nature: just think of the time and stress in commuting or driving. With higher oil prices and stuff, even the financial aspect is not justisfied. But then more importantly, you may make money from many sources, but you can't really buy time.
That's just my view, of course. The other funny thing about the whole home buying discussion is that there're just no limit to the different points of view about the decision.
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