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Why Real Estate Is the Silent Killer of Wealth
The Rich Bought Land. Then They Went Broke
Let’s get one thing straight: real estate is not the holy grail.
Yes, everyone and their grandmother swears by it. “Tangible assets,” “they’re not making more land,” “rent always goes up,” blah blah. But let me tell you something no one on your Instagram feed will: real estate is often just leverage dressed up as wisdom, and at worst, it’s a gilded coffin for dynastic wealth.
Buffett knows this. When asked why he prefers stocks over real estate, he answered with brutal clarity: real estate is capital-intensive, management-heavy, and hard to scale without leverage. It’s the opposite of what makes compounding work best. His portfolio doesn’t include apartment blocks. It includes businesses with high returns on capital, growing cash flows, and minimal friction.
But here’s the kicker: this isn’t just Buffett being quirky. It’s historical precedent.
Flip open any page of British history and you’ll find a long line of aristocrats who thought owning land would secure their power forever. Spoiler: it didn’t. They leveraged their estates to the hilt, borrowed against future rents, built mansions they couldn’t maintain, and when commodity prices fell, they collapsed like a house of cards, pun fully…
