"House hacking" means leveraging your own living space to offset costs. It might start by renting a spare room to cover rent, or buying a duplex, living in one unit and renting the other to pay the mortgage. This turns your biggest expense into an investment, building equity from day one.

Landlords rent long-term, enjoying stable, mostly hands-off income. Airbnb entrepreneurs go short-term, charging higher nightly rates in busy cities, often earning 2-3X more. It’s more work (cleanings, guests, messages) but can massively boost cash flow.

Buy undervalued, Renovate to increase worth, Rent it out, Refinance at new value to pull cash out, then Repeat with the same capital. It lets you recycle money and grow a portfolio without saving for years between deals.

Commercial tenants are businesses, meaning longer leases (often 5+ years) with built-in rent bumps. Many also pay taxes, insurance & maintenance, cutting your costs. Less hassle, more predictability, and often higher returns.

Think mobile home parks, self-storage, farmland, RV parks, billboards, laundromats. They’re less flashy, but deliver stable, high returns (self-storage alone averaged 16% over 25 years), are easier to automate, and often face less competition.

Instead of just buying with your own money, you pool funds from investors to buy bigger deals like apartment complexes. You handle the work; they supply capital. You earn equity, fees, and scale up fast — turning real estate into a team sport.

Developers buy raw land or old sites and build new projects, from malls to stadiums. It’s high risk, requires vision and big capital, but can 10x investments. They create value where none existed — that’s how generational fortunes are made.

Massive funds like BlackRock buy thousands of homes or neighborhoods. They’re so big that if the market crashed, governments would likely bail them out to avoid economic collapse. It means near-zero downside risk and huge power.