My chart shows this. It shows the annualized inflation-adjusted change in house prices to June 2011 for every month since 1989. This shows that even if you had bought at the very best time - January 1998 - your annualized real gain would only have been 4.3 per cent. That's before insurance and maintenance costs. Had you bought 20 years ago, your real return would have been just 2.1 per cent per year.
