To that degree, our debate is academic in nature here, with good points from both sides, IMO.

I arrived as a freshman on Academic probation due to GPA.

I switched to a low key very boring job not trying to do anything stellar that academics pushes you to do.

Faculty want to be at a highly ranked place,” said Jeffrey Goldberg, UA provost and senior vice president for academic affairs.

I am increasingly convinced that the end of this real estate up cycle will come when Biden really does something dramatically stupid to increase housing supply, a kind of well-meaning academic bonehead lefty move to equal GW Bush's well-meaning academic bonehead righty moves to open up the housing market by deregulating lending to subprime buyers, Biden will absolutely have to promise some totally daft housing lunacies to his base in his bid to get re-elected in 2024, that's for sure, while anyone who comes up on the right will just have to point to the affordable housing shortage as a failure of federal policy and not actually make any firm promises about how to fix it.

I’m not sure if this is a fair view of the academic field of economics.

The point is that tracking housing costs for the entire USA, while interesting from an academic economists POV, is virtually meaningless to specific RE investors, especially those in places like costal CA, NYC, Hawaii, etc.  

We are lucky to live near many, many universities so we generally can rent the academic terms pretty easily through SabbaticalHomes.com.

It's just that I have seen academic analysis cause paralysis way too often.

In commercial property it can be an educated guess becuase the value is based on the cash flow.However the value of SFHs is much harder to predict because a homeowners desire to live in a particular area can drive the prices up well beyond what makes sense from a cash flow perspective.My point is that yes you can use IRR to ehlp calculate the total return from both cahs flow and appreciation but it is as much an academic expercise as it is a practical too for SFHs.