If you're willing to employ a "buy and hold" strategy for property to ride out the bottom of the RE market, you should be able to do it just as well with a diversified investment portfolio.
If the value of your asset falls, you've lost net worth.
It's preposterous to claim that, even though the price of your home has fallen by half, and you are servicing the mortgage on the old value, that you haven't lost anything. Or that the fact that you can offset capital gains with capital losses somehow makes a plunge in value "worth it".
"Paper losses" are losses. The value of the asset isn't based on the price you paid.
