Your rentals should only perform better over time as rental income increases faster than property taxes, insurance and other expenses.How much will that contribute to your retirement income?

How do debt funds perform when stock market go down? 

They tend to be much more helpful when you do :)Then, when you find a sub-market, look at what the top-performing properties are doing.

We are in the sunbelt states and they have performed great for all of our investors.I would be careful with the "riskiness" cheaper isnt always better.

Keep money on hand.But, if you are well funded, know what you are doing, stick to the law, are proactive, are organized and honest and don't promise what you can't perform and don't "rent back" to the seller for any reason at all and don't borrow from or involve people who can't afford to lose their investment with you and don't put 3rd and 4th liens (borrowed money) on properties and don't buy from "vulnerable people", and you buy only in states that don't focus on suing for perceived wrongs, it won't be a problem, most of the time. ;-)

Imagine the cash flow I could have if I desired (my cash flow is not great because I extract value regularly and because I prefer my return to be in tax free or tax deferred sources and cash flow you get taxed on yearly).Case Schiller used to (maybe still does) publish a residential market performance ranking since 2000.  

Here are all the things in the contract and here are all the things we did for her:What Six Figure Land Flipper Agreed To Perform Under The Agreement, AndSix Figure Land Flipper Performance Of Its Obligations Under That Contract.Coaching Services.

It would still depend on your credit score/properties performance to qualify.

From: https://www.irs.gov/publications/p925#en_US_2022_publink1000...Qualifications.You qualified as a real estate professional for the year if you met both of the following requirements.More than half of the personal services you performed in all trades or businesses during the tax year were performed in real property trades or businesses in which you materially participated.You performed more than 750 hours of services during the tax year in real property trades or businesses in which you materially participated.Don’t count personal services you performed as an employee in real property trades or businesses unless you were a 5% owner of your employer.

If you do not, and you break the laws, and the deal doesn’t perform as intended or as explained, then we are not just talking about losing a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars like you could lose on a single family home where you did your numbers wrong, we are talking about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars and possible jail time for SEC violations.