returns are better than average real estate returns.
The truth is - NO ONE KNOWS!!! And the reason they don't know is no one has the data on real estate deals. People don't know the revenues, the expenses, the cost of capital, the amount of leverage, the refinance proceeds and how they were reinvested etc.
And... we also don't know the amount of work put into a real estate deal - for instance - buy a home, fix it, and flip it... the value add piece of the equation makes it silly to try and compare it to stock market returns. The hours of work spent improving the real estate has to be part of the math... but no one has that kind of data on the trillions of dollars of real estate in the US.
There are simply too many unknowns in real estate for you to make your claim.