That's 6.5% CAGR for 27 years in REAL DOLLARS (inflation adjusted).

Though I don't doubt you, and I'm sure it has worked out well for a whole lot of people in a lot of attractive cities, especially well to do people in good areas of popular cities, beware extrapolating too much from one data point.

There are some very serious number crunchers and research papers that have studied what has happened on average in the US. Few places are average, but to the extent it matters, constant quality US residential real estate rose in price at only inflation + 1%/year in the 20th century. For each place that it soared (like yours), there was a place that it crashed.

If you don't have better information than the average schmuck then that 1% is what someone buying a US residence should probably expect, plus or minus a cyclical adjustment for the luck of the purchase date. Local price to income ratios relative to their historical average are a good starting point for adjustment. They are elevated in big US cities lately.

Affordability is a different thing, since it's cyclical in a different way with real interest rates, so it's not as good a yardstick for doing a cyclical house price adjustment. For the median family buying the median home, mortgage payments doubled from roughly 14% of monthly household income in 2020 to nearly 29% in June 2023, the highest since 1985. I don't have more recent figures handy.

Jim