Buying property, whether through direct purchasing or via tax liens, is a very versatile type of investment. Not only can you see it, feel it, touch it, there are many things you can do with it. You can buy it and go and live in it yourself, you can buy a tax lien wreck to do up and sell on, you can rent your property out or you can buy land and build your own home. In other words, you can enjoy property in a hands-on way which would be difficult to do with purely financial investments.
You can stamp your personality on a piece of real estate, which you cannot do with equities. You can make your home look lovely, you can renovate, decorate or extend it.
You can use a property as your main residence, or for holidays. You can enjoy your home for part of the year and rent it out for the rest of the year. Or you can have lodgers or paying guests, run holiday cottages or use part of your home as an office. You can create a separate flat in the basement or in the garden. As opposed to equities, you can use and enjoy your property as a full- or part-time home all the while it is (with any luck) making you money.
Then for many people, property has an emotional pull which merely playing the money markets does not possess. There is only one kind of beauty in a share - when it goes up in value. But you can take an aesthetic interest in a beautiful home which you cannot do with a beautiful share. A home can be an architectural gem or ‘full of charm and character’ in estate-agent speak. You can fall in love with a property in a way that would be difficult when just moving money around.
It is this aspect, I think, which gives property its special appeal. You are not merely hoarding for the future, you are getting pleasure and excitement from it in the present.
In my adult life, I have owned or lived in more than 20 different homes and each one has been exciting, challenging or highly profitable. Not all the homes have provided every ingredient on the wish list, but each has been important in its way, and each has had something special about it, at least to me. And while I lived in or owned them, I put something of myself in them. Then, when they were sold or I moved away, the next owner changed their personality again.
These are the considerable upsides of investing in property.