Real estate has clearly been shown to not be resistant to inflation over the past year.
Resistant to inflation means that the price increases roughly with the same % as inflation.
Using your approach you'd end up saying something like Apple is experiencing inflation because its price has gone up more against housing, oil, General Electric stock. Yeah, that could be done, but it's not the way the word is being used in this conversation. We're talking about inflation of US dollars against a basket of goods as measured by the CPI as opposed to talking about an increase in housing costs relative to Apple stock.
>Inflation is the decrease in the purchasing power of a currency.
>Inflation is the decline of purchasing power of a given currency over time.
>Inflation is a persistent rise in the average level of prices over time in a given currency.
> Inflation occurs when prices rise, decreasing the purchasing power of your dollars.
Those are literally the top search results for "inflation" when I Google the term. Now certainly your Google search for that term may differ from mine and you are certainly welcome to share your findings. Until then I will rest satisfied that my first sentence expressing that inflation is almost always understood to be with respect to a currency is also true.
Furthermore I believe that investing in real estate promotes those asset owners to contribute to the neighborhoods they've invested in. When you invest in something you are participating in its growth and you're attempting to align your well being with the well being of the asset you're invested in. That's a great thing.
The downside to real estate investment is that it could prevent future people from participation. The solution to that isn't to stop treating real estate as an investment, it's to allow more opportunities for building and to incentivize people to build entirely new communities instead of pigeon holing everyone into a handful of existing mega cities.
I think this is treated differently in different cultures. In Germany, while there is a real-estate as investment market, many people don't (expect to) move much during their lifetime. They buy their home ('Eigenheim') essentially for life (sans the tail end in a nursing home). Still many put a lot of time and money into those houses they don't expect to sell. It's a quality-of-life thing (and some bragging rights). You can (and some do) spend easily a fortune on a kitchen alone. You even find more than one kind of light switch there.
So I'm not quite convinced that real-estate as investment is necessary to drive housing quality.
I am not an expert on the German real-estate market, but the first search results on Google indicate that Germany has a very active real-estate investment market and that home ownership in Germany is among the lowest in the world, the majority of Germans rent their home.
Either those people are renting from the government, or they are renting from a private landlord, either an individual or a corporation. If they are renting from a private landlord, and once again my very cursory research indicates 96.7% of housing is privately owned, then that's a big sign that the landlord owns the property for the purpose of deriving an income from it. Given that 56% of homes in Germany are rented out (one of the highest rates in the world), that indicates that at a minimum, 56% of homes in Germany satisfy the textbook definition of being investment properties.