Investing in Real Estate vs. Stocks: What's the Difference?

There are basic differences when it comes to investing in real estate versus stocks, but how well you do with either depends a lot on timing. Very few stocks would have beat buying beachfront property in California in the 1970s and selling 20 years later, and virtually no real estate purchase could have beat the returns you would have earned if you had invested in shares of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, or Walmart early in those companies' histories.

Timing is impossible to predict when making investment choices, but understanding each type of investment is key to choosing the best strategy to help your money grow and create financial security.

Investing in Real Estate vs. Stocks at a Glance

Investing in Real Estate vs. Stocks: Cash Flow

When you invest in real estate, you are buying physical land or property. Some real estate costs you money every month that you hold it, such as a vacant parcel of land that you pay taxes and maintenance on while waiting to sell to a developer.

Rent from real estate can provide steady, reliable cash flow on a month-to-month basis. Some real estate is cash-generating, such as an apartment building, rental houses, storage sheds, or a strip mall where you pay expenses, tenants pay rent, and you keep the difference as profit.

Cash flow from stock investments isn't the same as cash flow that would come from renting out property you own. Most cash from stocks comes in the long term when you sell. However, investors can be paid while still owning stock through dividends, which you can reinvest. If you use the cash that a company sends you for owning its stock to buy more shares, over time, you should own far more shares, which entitles you to even higher cash dividends.

The company’s board of directors, who are elected by stockholders just like you, decide how much of the profit gets reinvested in expansion each year and how much gets paid out as cash dividends.

Investing in Real Estate vs. Stocks: Management Costs

Real estate can cost you money every month if the property is unoccupied. You still have to pay taxes, maintenance, utilities, insurance, and more. If you find yourself with a higher-than-usual vacancy rate due to factors beyond your control, you could actually end up losing money every month.

While you may pay brokerage fees or fees to a mutual fund manager for management of your stock investments, these are proportionally smaller than they can be for, say, the cost of running an apartment building or another real estate investment.

Investing in Real Estate vs. Stocks: Time and Effort

Compared to stocks, real estate takes a lot of hands-on work. You have to deal with the midnight phone calls about water leaks in a bathroom, gas leaks, the possibility of getting sued for a bad plank on the porch, and more. Even if you hire a property manager to take care of your real estate investments, managing your investment will still require occasional meetings and oversight.

When you buy shares of stock, you are buying a piece of a company. If a company has 1,000,000 shares outstanding, and you own 10,000 shares, you own 1% of the company. Unlike running a small business, owning part of a business through shares of stock doesn’t require any work on your part, other than researching each company to determine whether it is a sound investment. You benefit from the company’s results but don’t have to show up to work.

Investing in Real Estate vs. Stocks: Volatility

Real estate investments have traditionally been a terrific inflation hedge to protect against a loss in the purchasing power of the dollar. While real estate can go down over years or decades in certain areas, most investors who see that starting to happen can sell their investment before they lose money.

The price of stocks can experience extreme fluctuations in the short term. Your $40 stock could go to $10 or to $80. If you know why you own shares of a particular company, that shouldn’t bother you in the slightest. You can use the opportunity to buy more shares if you think they are too cheap, or sell shares if you think they are too expensive. If you hold on to well-valued stocks over the long term, these highs and lows are often smoothed out, but if you are hoping to make money quickly, the volatility in stock value can work against you.

Investing in Real Estate vs. Stocks: Liquidity

When it comes to investing, liquidity is the ability to get cash out of your investment easily. Stocks are far more liquid than real estate investments. During regular market hours, you can sell your entire position, many times, in a matter of seconds. It may take a few days to see the proceeds, but you can get out of your investment pretty much whenever you want.

When you own a piece of real estate and need to sell it for cash, it can take at least a month. You may have to list real estate for days, weeks, months, or in extreme cases, years before finding a buyer. Once you find a buyer, your property goes into at least a 30-day escrow, during which time there are inspections, title searches, signing of documents, and bank fund transfers that must take place before the property changes hands, and you get your money.

Investing in Real Estate vs. Stocks: Diversification

Both real estate and stocks can provide long-term financial gain, and both come with risks. When choosing the right investment strategy for you, the best way to hedge against that risk while taking advantage of the potential gains is to diversify as much as you can.

You can diversify much more easily with stocks than with real estate, especially with mutual funds. You can buy stocks in several companies, so that if one of them takes a hit, you could still make money on another. Mutual funds carefully choose stocks to ensure that the funds are properly diversified.

Unless you've got unlimited funds, when you invest in real estate, you will probably only have a few properties at most. That makes it harder to diversify, but even within real estate, you can diversify by carefully choosing the locations and types of properties you buy.

Investing in Real Estate vs. Stocks: Access

You don't need to have huge sums of available cash to begin investing in the stock market. With some mutual funds or individual stocks, you can invest as little as $100 per month. There are also micro-saving apps that allow you to begin investing for less than $25.

Real estate requires substantially more money in your initial investment, as well as the costs of maintenance and improvements. The growth in popularity of real estate investing trusts (REIT) is allowing more people to pool their money to purchase real estate.

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