The comparison is often made between investing in Real Estate vs investing in the Stock Market. There are many strong points to both arguments, but as an Investment Advisor, I am going to argue the side of why the stock market is a better long term investment. Note, I am not inferring you should not buy a home, nor am I inferring that you should exclusively put all of your money in the stock market. This argument is just in terms of where you should put extra money that you would like to grow for retirement or other purposes.
Here are 6 advantages of investing in stocks over investing in real estate.
1.Effort/Work
Whether you are flipping homes, renting properties, or developing land, there is a whole lot more hands on work and extra time as compared to ownership of stocks. If you have an investment advisor, you could realistically spend absolutely no time “working” on your stock ownership and still get the growth of the market. Lucky for you, stocks don’t have furnaces that break, or water pipes that leak.
2. Diversification
Diversification is a very important concept. The old saying is don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Diversification in Real Estate would involve buying homes, apartments, commercial property, and farm land etc., all in different areas of the country. You would have to have quite a bit of money to be fully diversified. With the stock market, if you are invested in a Matson Money Fund, you can start with one dollar and be invested in about 12,000 stocks throughout the world.
3. Liquidity
Liquidity is how easy it is for you to sell. Stocks are extremely liquid, with most stocks being sold within seconds of offering them for sale. With Real Estate, it can take weeks, months, or sometimes years to sell or rent out a property.
4. Costs
The cost of owning property could include all or most of the following; real estate agent fee, property taxes, maintenance, utilities, mortgage interest, and insurance. The cost of owning stocks usually only includes an investment advisor fee, and mutual fund management fee.
5. Debt
When investing in real estate it is almost always tied to taking on debt, because of the large amounts of money needed to buy a property. Taking on debt automatically increases the risk level with any investment. With stock based mutual funds, you can start with $1, and never have any debt to worry about.
6. Return
There is a lot of variables that come into play when comparing returns of real estate investing vs stock based mutual funds. You can really cherry pick numbers to make either side look much better than the other. Just comparing actual long term growth in prices of real estate vs prices of stocks, stocks win that competition easily. But if you include rental income, it can obviously increase your overall real estate investment return. With that though, you have to consider the risk of not being able to rent it out.
If you are looking for a way to get a high return with lower risk and little hassel, my opinion is that your #1 option is to put your money in stocks, via a diversified Roth IRA or 401k.
Feel free to comment with your thoughts.
By Jimmy Hancock
References
- Kennon, Joshua. “Should You Invest in Real Estate or Stocks?” The Balance. N.p., 17 Oct. 2016. Web. 12 May 2017.