If you are the type of person who pays a lot of attention to the hype in the news, you have most likely formed the pre-chewed opinion that real estate is essentially dead as an investment. Not only is this only the case in a literal sense, but it has never genuinely been true when it comes to the capacity of any given person to make a large amount of money in the process of conducting real estate transactions. And despite what a lot of people think, flipping is nowhere near the only way that they can make a decent income off of the possession and the use of real estate. Those sorts of opinions tend to be very self limiting, to say the least.
For one thing, real estate flippers tend to be a very short sighted bunch who have little to no concept of anything beyond “a quick pay day.” It happens even to the best of us- we get into this mindset that if we could just make one major transaction, that it would be all that we could possibly need to take us down the path of riches and onto easy street. Even if easy street was a real place, it would undoubtedly be a slum by now, because all of the genuinely wealth minded people would have long since fled it amongst the throng of “get rich quick” people who very rarely achieve the sort of wealth they desire.
For another thing, there will always be a method of making good money through real estate. Often it is not so much through the transfer of ownership of an underlying plot of land or building, but of the control of use (through rent or the contracted sale of the asset) which builds the long term wealth that the late night TV gurus never bother to mention. After all, what kind of fool would ever want to sell something that pays them?