I should add something to the above post. Owning real estate is definitely the best way to invest, but it isn't guaranteed you'll make money with it.
We moved to Florida two years ago today. Prior to that, we lived in upstate New York about 90 miles from New York City which was commutable via train. In 2009 I was laid off in a mass layoff conducted by my employer. I was more than ready to leave my job, but my wife and her job was a different story. She's 7 years younger than me and she could not retire in 2009. So I took a few "retirement jobs" and waited for her to catch up to me. In 2009 when that mass layoff hit, housing values plummeted. We didn't owe as much on our house as what it could be sold for therefore we were OK, but many others that were laid off were in a completely different boat. The suicide rate spiked in the county we lived in during 2009.
Slowly but surely housing prices started to recover, but they never went back to what they were prior to the 2009 layoff. In The Fall of 2018 my wife had a health scare. (emergency open heart surgery). After her surgery (in mid-2019) she told me she didn't want to return to her job, so the house was put on the market and sold. We walked away with money from the sale of it, and we were glad about that, but it was a lot less money than it would have been had there been no mass layoff.
In early 2020 when Covid hit, the exodus from NYC drove housing prices through the roof. (Above what they were in 2009 when the layoff hit) It would have been nice to have that extra money, but because my wife's heart surgeon told me it was a good thing she got to the hospital when she did "because she would not have survived much longer" it is impossible for me to care less about not getting it. Having money is great, but it isn't everything. Today, my wife is totally fine, we're happy and having lots of fun here in Florida. We've made some FABULOUS new friends and we just love them. I have a happy ending to my story and I'm grateful for it because I know too many people from back in our New York days that do not. I've been told by people still up in NY that "You're incredibly lucky how it all turned out for you." Some of the people that told me that are still in tough shape healthwise not to mention financially. G5