IMO, the best bang for the buck is a single family or duplex, a good or decent location will have appreciation, it's more marketable, financing options are favorable, rental market is more stable with less vacancy, maintenance is non-commercial, fewer code requirements, less baby setting of tenants is required, rents are not impacted by competitive units as much, quality of tenants can be better......hands down, I'd rather hold 40 SFDs than one egg basket. :)  

There's secondary trend also that mimic like you said, most happened due to baby boomer generation, they keep moving up house but then when retirement age is near, they purchased outside the  area, so lets say they purchase SF in Daly City,CA twenty years ago for 300k , now they sell their house for 1.5M ; when they have no job or near retirement, they move to Sacramento where home price is still 400k-500k.

What would make baby boomers and the silent generation vacate their homes?

I still feel like a baby in the woods when it comes to ways to borrow money.

There are ways to get out of it early but only as a result of your life circumstances changing (like having a baby and needing more space, moving closer to your job, etc.) 

I say this because, it is very likely your first investment will be a house hack and not have children especially a new born, will give you the most flexibility to be able to capitalize and maximize your potential income from that property.I would focus on continued free education for now, you don't need to pay for any kind of learning until at least after you get that first investment, since there is more than enough information out for you to be able to do that without paying for education at this point.Good Luck, Keep us posted on how its going.

😛 All joking aside, congrats to everyone - I "know" most of those people on the list and with the exception of Nathan they're all pretty good guys 😛😛 (j/k Nathan's my brudda by anudda mudda, we're even both baby bald) 😛

I felt like a sucker for paying market prices, but I had a two-year-old and I was 8 months pregnant with my second baby, and I work full time, so I and didn't want to do a lot of work; I just wanted to buy my first property.So, what happened?

Her grown kids were still living there, one with baby.

@Jonathan R McLaughlin update is they weren't interested in Cash for keys since they just moved in and the baby was due end November.