I find some of the "rent is better for investment" crowd to be quite ironic.
They love to claim RE prices are bubbled because of "speculators", but then also have no problem "speculating" that they could invest their saved money at 8-9% elsewhere, while RE may increase at 1-3%.
Any argument can be made if we can just make up numbers and throw them into some comparison calculator.
In the real world, far more people have had profitable investment through real estate, and far more people have been screwed going after these other investment options.
At the end of the day, either way can work if you invest wisely and get a bit lucky, but RE seems like a far more likely bet IMO (admittedly biased, but historically supported).
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