Anyone that thinks renting houses is passive income has never done it.

Repairs, collections, advertising, evictions, etc.

...which are things you do every now and then, unlike a job, where you have to be there 5/7 days for a number of hours ?

But all of this is something you can contract out to an agency for a cut of the rent.

That cut of the rent ends up being around all of the cash flow for a newly bought property, and in many markets ends up being more than the initial cash flow. It’s a second job with irregular on-call.

Well, then you've leveraged too highly. Estate agents here take a fairly small percentage of the rent to manage all of this, so it takes a fairly small deposit before your rental income less management fees can't cover the remaining mortgage.

Property management companies in the US take somewhere in the 8-12% range. Is it dramatically lower wherever you are?

Towards the low end of that, but even at 12% it just means you can afford lower leverage.

People do magically own houses. It's called inheritance.

Do you think houses are most commonly inherited or worked for?