The leverage I am talking about is being a landlord where most of your cash flow is dependent on one or a handful of tenants reliably paying rent. Maybe it would have been better to not be a single owner of a fourplex, but to go in with 20 other people on ownership of an underlying llc of that fourplex, and invest in another 19 similarly structured fourplex llc's. Same investment but de risked due to spreading it across some 80 people paying rent vs just four people. Or you can just put that money into REITs where now its what several hundred or maybe thousands of people in the tenancy pool you are investing in.