Agreed. Over a decade ago, to try to overcome my fear to make such a large purchase, I did the math and decided to bake very conservative assumptions into my decision-making. My rent then was $1800 a month, so 5 years of that is $108k. If I kept a similar mortgage payment as my rent (in reality, my payment was actually more like $1450), I realized that all I had to do was stay there 5 years while having it lose ($108k minus property taxes paid) in value and I'd break even in terms of cash flow, whereas the upside, if it stayed flat or appreciated, was that I'd have built up substantial equity.

(In the end, the gamble paid off great - the condo appreciated by about 300k in those 5 years)