Absolutely right about the advantages of leverage. And with real estate, you can do a 1031 tax exchange and continue growing your wealth tax free indefinitely as long as you can pay the property taxes. Although, residential real estate offers a pittance in returns compared to commercial.

But I think almost everyone who doesn't have an interest in doing the grunt work of real estate investing would be better served sticking their money in an index fund ETF rather than real estate. It's drastically less work, less worry. Extremely low cost broad market index funds and ETFs are relatively new too, I'd be interested in seeing an analysis of performance after they went mainstream.