and very few will get wealthy doing stocks unless they get lucky on some crazy stocks. You can build a retirement portfolio through stocks. But RE returns can easily be 10x stocks. You have leverage, cash flow, business expenses. Then you can releverage and you basically have 0 invested. You could do this in stocks but very difficult to get dividends to pay the leverage amount like rents pay a mortgage. After a few years you don't even have to be very leveraged. We never go above 70%.

But Real estate is not easy and it is a job. When you are getting started be prepared to manage and repair properties yourself. It is unlikely you will cash flow enough to hire a property manager or often times even repair people at the beginning. The problems with PMs is they take 10% but also don't care about your property or the turnarounds like you will. A PM will usually want 30 days to turn over a tenants (thats one month lost rent). I am turning one over today in less than 1 day. Tenants moved out yesterday morning. Cleaners came yesterday afternoon (that used to be me) tenants moving in today.

If you don't want to do any of the work and just buy passive properties it will be difficult to make money.