A two bedroom apartment in a decent area of Madrid costs around 500,000 $EUR . Add a 6% transfer tax, that is 30,000 more before you even own it.

Then comes maintenance, rental management, the risk of non payment, and the risk of squatters. When you finally sell, the city charges you a tax on the increase in land value, and that tax base keeps getting raised.

Compare that to buying shares of a REIT. Professionals manage the properties, you collect distributions, and these companies pay out essentially all their profits to shareholders by structure.

The protection against currency debasement works two ways here. Rental income gets indexed to inflation, and rising property values flow directly into the share price. Same inflation hedge as physical property, none of the operational headache, a fraction of the capital required to start.

Real estate ownership is not the only way to get real estate exposure. Sometimes it is not even the best way.

Would you rather manage a tenant or collect a dividend? $BTC $BNB