Financing also literally causes or just is monetary inflation, in a debt-based fiat currency system.

Those with access to credit leverage it and prosper roughly proportional to their level of credit access, those without access to it pay the inflation tax and suffer.

This is why capitalism has bubble/pop cycles, inherently, systemically, unavoidably.

When your home is functionally your own personal bank, you want home values to keep going up... which necessarily causes less people to be able to afford homes, and in a society based on access to credit being necessary to 'buy' a home, this creates and exacerbates a class divide.

(You really haven't 'bought' your home untill you've fully paid off the mortgage, untill then you're more or less doing a complex rent-to-own from the bank.)

Its also why you get 'too big to fail' banks and other entities... they have a bunch of bad debt, and if they are forced to actually account for it, well that would mean so many write offs that it would massively decrease the money supply, which is a recession/depression.

The same dynamic is at play with college costs.

More financialized, more loans? Prices go up. Less people can afford college, or in our lovely system where student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, more people become literal debt slaves.

Same dynamic is also at play with vehicles, cars.

... real estate is only a hedge against inflation in a society that is stratifying, becoming more inequitable.

If that's your inflation hedge strategy, you must understand that mass broad usage of this strategy actively causes the impoverishment of those who can't afford super-inflating home prices.

Super-inflating home values is the Boomers climbing a ladder, and then once they're on top of it, constantly pulling that ladder higher, further and further away from the ground, from all their kids.

EDIT:

Median age of a new home buyer, as of latest data, is now 40 years old.

It was ~28 through most of the 80s.