People often fail to take into account that risk has a value. I did some quantitative analysis (most of that is BS but that's another story) for a gig and it was big eye opener.

People talk like:

"Well property praises will always go up. It's a good investment yada yada" but there is a risk that they won't (which often is a sore point). There's even a risk they'll crash. Many people (at least in Sweden) is so over leveraged that it wouldn't take that much for the bank to require a mortgage holder to put in more money to cover the decreased value of the property.

How large risk for a "catastrophic decrease" varies but taking that risk is a cost in itself. It's the same as with insurance, the less healthy/more risk you are the more it costs.

With renting you might not have the upside of investment, but you also don't have to bear the "cost" of that risk