There's a kind of interesting way to think about this, especially in the UK. Because people don't automatically think in terms of opportunity cost and don't know eg. that the long term equity return is X, there's a disconnect between reality and how people think of it. People in the UK think of rent as "wasted" money. In an efficient market, it wouldn't be wasted at all because the saving from lower rent vs mortgage…
There's some other mechanism at work in the UK as far as I can tell from just reading the news - a recent case mentions that UK real estate is claimed to be a haven for laundering money. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/03/bankers-wife...