She'd have to sell the apartment to get the cash from that appreciation. If she liked where she is living, is she going to sell that apartment at the "right ti

She'd have to sell the apartment to get the cash from that appreciation. If she liked where she is living, is she going to sell that apartment at the "right time?" And then move? Maybe she's talking about an apartment she wouldn't live in. If she wanted to buy to rent, and it's in an attractive neighborhood, isn't the price going to reflect its attractiveness? And then, are neighborhoods always going to get more attractive in the future? Isn't a coffee shop going to be successful in the same neighborhood rented property would? Wouldn't it fail in a correlated way to property? If it's so easy and obvious, haven't all the good deals in buy-to-rent been bought? Are you going to do a better job than someone marginally more effective a land lord? What about the #1 landlord? What if the neighborhood gets less attractive, and you must sell below what you paid for? What if it's the same attractive, but everyone sells at the same time so prices go down anyway? This happened a lot recently in markets like Miami. No of course what she's saying makes no sense. It's got this... low-information Robinhood Reddit level of finance knowledge that just doesn't reflect how few rags-to-riches landlord millionaires there are. They conflate hindsight with insight. There's the extremely narrow group of people, who won lottery tickets by living in houses in shitty neighborhoods that suddenly gentrified and yes, now they can sell their homes and move and become very wealthy. In California this is enshrined in Prop 13 and it is the single most important reason your friend could never achieve what she's saying here: she would be outcompeted by lotto ticket winners who pay basically no taxes and therefore enjoy margins on rent radically higher than she ever could. In places around the world things like Prop 13 are the actual economic advantages that make capital intensive businesses like property ownership effective.