Does co-living actually beat a REIT once the time you cannot get back is priced in

This comparison gets messier every time it is run properly. VNQ has returned roughly 8 to 9 percent annualized over the past decade, and it can be bought or sold in thirty seconds with zero phone calls. A co-living house near a regional hospital or university corridor supposedly throws off 10 to 14 percent cash on cash, but that spread is doing a lot of work before it deserves trust. The time cost is the part nobody has priced well. Management fees can at least be subtracted. The cognitive load that never shows up in a spreadsheet is different: the late texts and the turnover coordination, or the month spent tracking down a county permit issue. None of that hits the income statement. So when someone shows a 12 percent return on a five bedroom in a market like Akron or Columbus, it is genuinely unclear whether that is a real premium or an unpriced job. An investor comfortable with the passivity of REITs faces exactly this question before committing to ownership, and I would like to hear from those who ran the same comparison and what made them tip one way or the other.