[FabHK]

Sensible answers, thanks. With those caveats in place, what you say makes a lot of sense. Particularly like the focus on buy-and-hold and investment, as opposed to flipping and speculation.

A few more things come to mind:

1) cash reserves - need enough to cover emergencies and periods where you don't receive rent, for one reason or the other, particularly of you happen to be underwater.

2) demographic changes can still screw things up. As an extreme example, take villages in eastern Germany or Spain - both prices and rents have been falling.

3) however, if approached carefully, this sounds good - maybe too good. There is no free lunch! So, what's the catch? Normally, if you have this good an opportunity, you have either hidden risks or restricted access. Do most people not get the initial money (or cojones) together to pull the trigger?

[jsonmez]

Great question. I like how you think.

The catch in, IMO, is that you need the right knowledge to pull it off. It's not as easy as it looks and it does take some cojones--like you said.

Most people say, "sounds like a good idea" and never do anything.

There are very few people who will teach you how to do it without ripping you off and selling you some scam.

Honestly, that is why I put my course together.

Yes, it's $500. But if you actually follow the advice, it's dirt cheap and I'm not selling you a bunch of get rich quick BS, like most real estate "scammy" stuff.

Here is the link if you are interested: https://simpleprogrammer.com/products/simple-real-estate/

[lutorm]

You also need to be able to afford a down payment and still have a reasonable cash reserve. That there pretty much puts the majority of the population out of play.

[jsonmez]

Yes, it puts a large number of people out of play--but not software developers.

That's why I recommend it to them.

You can find deals for $100k where you put down $10-$20k. Which is a lot of money, yes, but I know it's possible, because I saved that much in a year as a SW dev.

And then you can have cash reserves of $5k or so (which could be 401k or something else.)

Even a Heloc could be a cash reserve if needed.

There are ways to make it work.