The US is pretty unique in that mortgages are typically fixed for the length of the loan, which means the monthly outgoing is guaranteed to go down in real terms due to inflation

Renting means that your rent will typically stay the same in real terms, so increase each month, and indeed you might find your landlord decides to sell and suddenly you're homeless.

Most people in the UK, despite lifetime fixed interest mortgages being very rare, buy for stability, and to ensure they don't have to pay rent in later life. They might do an equity release as they are retired to give them more money, but that's certainly not the norm.

Now the buying of additional properties from the mid 90s was very profitable, house prices would increase far more than rental income, and you could leverage that, and some people (spurred by daytime tv shows) decided to buy a house, spend 100k doing it up, and selling for 150k more than they bought it, making a 50k profit. Had they not done it up they'ld likely have made more money, as the profit was caused by increasing house prices.

Certainly in the UK that was still a small part of the market.

The biggest leap was the move from the mid 90s to the mid 00s of house price:wage ratio from about 4-5:1 to around 7-8:1 as mortgage companies would lend more -- typically 4 times two incomes (in the 80s and 90s mortgage companies wouldn't lend that much).

Since then house prices have broadly remained locked to wages at a radio of 7:1. Its dropped to about 6.5 and gone up to about 8 over the last 20 years.