strongly encourage you to pick a different route than B.

I love real estate and it is my chosen investment vehicle, but I wouldn't dump $2M into it (especially the way you are talking about) unless I had spent a lot of time learning how to do it profitably.

If you are really interested in real estate but don't want to take the time to learn how to do it profitably, I would suggest an REIT or some other vehicle that doesn't require the know-how.

That said, a real estate investor who knows what he's doing can reasonably expect to earn at least a 10% return, depending on how you measure "return" and how active you want to be with it.