If everyone you know is telling you to buy a house, you should read Robert Shiller's work.
Yale economist Robert Shiller won a Nobel prize on Monday (or, rather, a third of one) for his work suggesting that financial markets might not always be quite as efficient as we think, in large part due to human miscalculation about the value of assets. He famously predicted soon-to-burst bubbles in the stock market during the tech boom, and later in the housing market (he gets particular credit for sounding these warnings in print, in a book meant for mass consumption).
The New York Times' David Leonhardt has the most digestible summary here of Shiller's long career:
Boiled down, Mr. Shiller’s central insight is that people make mistakes – and they tend to make the same mistakes over and over.
In the many realms where we make said mistakes, the housing market now stands out as a big one (the Nobel prize committee actually mentioned the single-family house in awarding part of the prize this year to Shiller).