You are obviously very knowledgeable about your field.Broad Index funds and residential real estate seem frothy to me. 

Thought about life estate but really unclear if addressing rent rate or rate index or something is a move people do.

As an investor it’s helpful to understand what tax structures are indexed to property ownership vs other vehicles like sales tax, corporate taxes, mineral royalties, etc.

and dump the rest into a brokerage account which holds ETF's invested in essentially total stock market indexes (VTI, VOO etc.).

There are limitations based on the Consumer Price Index.

@Spencer ElliottUsually indexed to prime rate so you are 200 bps over prime which is not optimal many banks offer slightly under or at prime. 

Can someone with a lot of experience in TDs and stock-index ETFs compare these two investments in terms of risk-adjusted returns?  

I would also suggest looking into Guardian’s whole life policy because they have an index participation rider which grows minimum 4% or maximum 12.5% based on the performance of the S&P 500.

After two months of slight (0.1% MoM) decreases, CoreLogic’s national Home Price Index jumped 0.7% MoM in Feb, way above their expectations.

Real estate only beats index fund investing (by enough to make it worth the hassle - or at all) when you use leverage (ideally, 4 to 1 or 5 to 1 leverage on an investment property), and the value of the real estate goes up.