I've never understood real estate investing... - You have to do a bunch of physical maintenance of the property and be on-call to unclog toilets - You have to

I've never understood real estate investing... - You have to do a bunch of physical maintenance of the property and be on-call to unclog toilets - You have to know landlord-tenant law inside and out, there are a lot of hidden gotchas that can get you sued for big money or even criminally prosecuted - You have to see stuff that's wrong with the property and understand how much you'll need to fix it - You have to know how to find all sorts of contractors who will do a good job and not rip you off - You can't invest in say the $500-$5000 range to get your feet wet at small scale, every property with any sort of building on it at all is like $50,000+, and building a brand-new house is even more expensive - Enormous leverage seems to be the norm, and in most states, the bank doesn't forgive debt that's not covered by sale of the collateral (house) - Anyone with enough money can do it, it's a perfectly competitive market where it seems difficult to have any kind of edge over professional landlords or house flippers that have built a career in this area, have a lot of capital and a staff of full-time experts optimizing every aspect down to a science - If I get on e.g. Zillow it says, "Such-and-such property in location A is worth $X and such-and-such property in location B is worth $Y where Y = 3X" and I say "Wait why is it that? Y = 2X or Y = 4X also seems equally reasonable, heck Y = X or Y = 5X don't seem unreasonable." I have no intuitive sense for what property value should be. - Your investment's locked up for a long time, it takes weeks / months to sell real estate. - In 2022, you'd be lucky if a computer from 2002 sells for maybe 5% - 10% of what it sold for in 2002. In 2022, you're telling me a house sells for.. enough more (in real terms) than what it sold for in 2002 that it would have been a worthwhile investment despite now being 20 years old(er)? That feels like some kind of violation of whatever is the financial equivalent of the laws of thermodynamics - You can do all your landlording right and still get screwed by tenants from hell. For me, a stock and an investment property both yielding 6.4% are in no way equivalent. Given all the downsides, the ROI on property would need to be like 5-10 times as high for stocks for me to even consider it.. and that gets into too-good-to-be-true returns. I know there are people who are experts in this area and people who say real estate's a good investment. But I don't understand real estate anywhere near well enough to put in the sums of money that seem to be required.