How your parents bought a house, and why that method fails now
The generation before us bought on relationships and location. Both of those signals have weakened.
The previous generation's property method was coherent and it usually worked. Buy in a known locality. Deal with someone the family had used before, or someone known to someone. Hold for decades. Ignore the market.
It worked because of conditions that have largely gone.
What made it work
Supply was constrained and demand was growing, so time forgave almost any entry price. Localities were stable and their trajectories were legible over decades. The number of participants was small enough that reputation was a genuine enforcement mechanism, a broker who behaved badly lost the whole community.
What changed
Supply expanded dramatically and unevenly, so 'it will appreciate eventually' stopped being reliably true for any specific property. New micro-markets appeared and matured in years rather than generations, making location judgement much harder. The market grew large enough that reputational enforcement stopped working, a broker can now behave badly and simply move to the next set of buyers.
The information required to evaluate a purchase properly also grew. Registry, mutation, RERA, litigation, licensing: these existed before, but the volume and complexity of what needs checking has increased substantially.
What replaces it
Verification replaces reputation. Not because people are less honest than they were, but because the mechanism that used to keep them honest no longer applies at this scale. You cannot rely on someone's standing in a community that is now too large to have one.
That is an unsentimental conclusion and it is not a comfortable one. But a method that depends on conditions which no longer hold is not a safe method, it just feels like one, which is considerably more dangerous.