In real estate investment, the most you need is guts,

which many people lack. Highly educated Chinese can do all the calculations, but when it comes to take the shot, not many have the courage. This is also true for the general public. Remember what old saying？秀才造反，三年不成。

Partly this is because RE investment involves a lot of money and it is hard to make a big decision for most people. You can take $50K to the stock market and you can play this and that stock, but any RE investment requires much more money than that.

One of the reason there is big profit in RE investment is the leverage. If you open a margin account for buying stocks, you can borrow $1 for every $1 you have. But for RE, because the downpayment is 20% - 25%, the leverage is twice or more than the stock market. In good times, you make money much faster. Also because the size of RE investment, there is no middle ground, you either make big or lose big.

RE market does not have better return than the stock market. Historically stock market return is around 8% percent, RE is one percent less than that. However, remember also that statistics says 80% of retail players in the stock market lose money.

How to operate in a flat market if you have a lot of cash? One way is to buy wholesale and sell out piece by piece. You do not need to wait for the market to appreciate, you are taking the margin between wholesale and retail. This even works in a slowly down market as long as the margin between wholesale and retail is big enough.