He did not say it explicitly, but I think that it is implied in this part of his comment:

> being skimmed off by landlords who just lazily sit around doing nothing productive

I would argue, that doing something that is not easy and taking risks is the opposite of lazily sitting around and doing nothing productive.

The only real risk is temporary expense and inconvenience if a tenant turns out to be bad.

Even if it's not possible to eliminate that risk, there are various not particularly challenging ways to minimise it.

On a return-for-hours-worked-actively metric, being a landlord can be extremely easy.

And you can trade off money for more time by handing over more or less all of it to agencies and/or informal support.