Why is it, exactly, that, as a rule of thumb, almost all people who start life poor and end up rich do it with real estate.
Buy low, sell high, and you get leverage provided to you by a bank. It shouldn't surprise anybody that it's an easy source of wealth!
There are also poor people who get rich with a carpet cleaning or cement delivery business, but they have to overcome challenges unique to their situation. So every success story looks like an irreplicable outlier.
TQQQ, a NASDAQ 3x leveraged ETF is up almost 50x since 2010.
Real estate has insane leverage via mortgage. 10% downpayment results in a 10x leverage, 5% downpayment is a 20x leverage.
Imagine a house that was purchased at 10% downpayment. A 2x (+100%) house value appreciation gives you a 11x (+1000%) return on that 10% downpayment.
A 2x appreciation is probably something 95+% of houses will never get to in a decent amount of time. As a benchmark, the S&P 500 tends to double every 10 years after adjusting for inflation. Not many houses do that. Yes, there are always markets where this happens, but it's not the norm and is pretty much a speculation game like stocks are.
Of course, taking leverage into account you don't need it to appreciate 2x. With a 10% downpayment you just need it to appreciate about 9-10% to double your investment (probably more than 10% to make up for all the fees you'll pay).
And don't forget to subtract all the interest payments you made while you wait for it to appreciate. Factor that in your ROI.
Most of the gains in real estate these days is finding crappy houses that you cannot get a bank loan for. So you buy it at a big discount if you have the funds, or you get a private loan at high interest. Spend 3-6 months bringing the house up to code and then refinance to rent or sell (i.e. flip).
I wouldn't bet on asset price appreciation being a reliable route to wealth any more without an information or leverage edge, like planning decisions, political and regulation shifts, etc. which have long-term effects that result in net present value asset price changes. Sometimes the edge is basically corruption, but sometimes it's bets based on trends.