Here is a typical example:
4362 Watch Hill St, The Villages, FL 32163 | Trulia
note, this is from an actual sale, not a listing. This is what the house sold for, as opposed to
asking price.
in July 2017 it sold for 294,700
in May 2023, it sold for 462,000
Take 6% for the realtor (correct me if that's wrong), and you have a gain of around 140K, over 6 years.
Carrying costs I'd estimate at around 12K/ year assuming no mortgage, so that 140K gets chopped down by 72K (again I'm doing this on a napkin, I didn't include bond payments ), so now we're looking at about 68K "profit" on a 6 year 294K investment, which is about 23% over 6 years, which is more like 3% to 3.5% return /year on the original investment.
Meanwhile that money was not in the stock market.
So, it's not the "no brainer" people sometimes like to make it out to be.