> Or you could just wait. ... 2: governments printing money inflated investor assets like stocks and real estate.
Waiting will only help modestly. In the meantime, while you wait, your purchasing power is being destroyed, which is likely to put you in an at-best net break-even scenario on waiting.
2a) Asset prices - such as housing - have been permanently adjusted higher because the real standard of living, the real value of the currencies in question (USD and Euro in this case) have been debased by the central banks and their wildly aggressive 'printing.'
Skeptical? You can see this vividly in the permanently set higher price of things like gold, oil, platinum, copper, silver. Gold isn't going back to $200 or $400 ever again. A gallon of milk will never be $0.25 again. Housing isn't going back, either. What you're seeing are permanently higher lows and higher highs on housing prices, as the currencies are getting destroyed. The average person can't outrun the destruction, only people with liquid assets can attempt to keep up. That isn't to say there can't be a drop in real-estate prices, rather, it's to say that the drop won't roll prices back to a prior band/range.
Occasionally we get a very dramatic demonstration of this destruction in action, as in ~2003-2007, the commodity bubble, caused by the disastrous US financial policies during the Bush years, which smashed the dollar and sent everything else soaring when priced in dollars (also nicely represented in the extreme skyrocketing in GDPs - when priced in dollars - in every other nation on the planet at exactly the same time; eg Czech's GDP went up 300% in just seven years, 2002-2008, priced in dollars; needless to say, their economy didn't actually expand by 300% in that time, that was the USD imploding).
The US has seen very modest real growth over the last 20 years, and a lot of inflation (housing, healthcare, education, vehicles, maintenance costs, etc.). Most people can't keep up with the asset inflation vs their incomes. The same is true in most of Europe, the EU has seen net zero growth for about ~13-14 years now (and that's ignoring the setback from the virus). People can only tolerate this situation for so long before you get hefty civil unrest or political revolution, we've prominently seen a taste of it in the US and France, and elsewhere.
Do you know why software developers are now earning a median of $110,000 per year in the US? Because they're one of the few segments keeping up with inflation at all (thanks to the super fat margins in the industry and global reach of US tech). $70,000 in 2000 is about equal to $110,000 today (and that's a poor adjustment, because major costs like education & healthcare & housing have soared over that time). Or price it in gold over time (up 500%+ since 2000), and then you'll see, the software developers are actually struggling to keep up, and everyone else is de facto drowning.