Food for thought:

"You don’t need to be an expert in order to achieve satisfactory investment returns... Focus on the future productivity of the asset you are considering.. If you instead focus on the prospective price change of a contemplated purchase, you are speculating.. Games are won by players who focus on the playing field – not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard... " - Warren Buffett

Warren Buffet is a household name. He needs no introduction. Suffice it to say that Warren Buffett is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is widely considered the most successful investor of the 20th century. He was ranked as the world's wealthiest person in 2008 and as the third wealthiest person in 2011.

It is a great privilege to learn from this investment guru. In an exclusive excerpt from his popular shareholder letter, Warren Buffett looks back at a pair of real estate purchases and the lessons they offer for equity investors. Hear Warren Buffett:

...let me first tell you about two small non stock investments that I made long ago. Though neither changed my net worth by much, they are instructive.

This tale begins in Nebraska. From 1973 to 1981, the Midwest experienced an explosion in farm prices, caused by a widespread belief that runaway inflation was coming and fueled by the lending policies of small rural banks. Then the bubble burst, bringing price declines of 50% or more that devastated both leveraged farmers and their lenders. Five times as many Iowa and Nebraska banks failed in that bubble’s aftermath as in our recent Great Recession.

In 1986, I purchased a 400-acre farm, located 50 miles north of Omaha, from the FDIC. It cost me $280,000, considerably less than what a failed bank had lent against the farm a few years earlier. I knew nothing about operating a farm. But I have a son who loves farming, and I learned from him both how many bushels of corn and soybeans the farm would produce and what the operating expenses would be. From these estimates, I calculated the normalized return from the farm to then be about 10%. I also thought it was likely that productivity would improve over time and that crop prices would move higher as well. Both expectations proved out.

I needed no unusual knowledge or intelligence to conclude that the investment had no downside and potentially had substantial upside. There would, of course, be the occasional bad crop, and prices would sometimes disappoint. But so what? There would be some unusually good years as well, and I would never be under any pressure to sell the property. Now, 28 years later, the farm has tripled its earnings and is worth five times or more what I paid. I still know nothing about farming and recently made just my second visit to the farm.

In 1993, I made another small investment. Larry Silverstein, Salomon’s landlord when I was the company’s CEO, told me about a New York retail property adjacent to New York University that the Resolution Trust Corp (RTC) was selling. Again, a bubble had popped — this one involving commercial real estate — and the RTC had been created to dispose of the assets of failed savings institutions whose optimistic lending practices had fueled the folly.

Here, too, the analysis was simple. As had been the case with the farm, the un-leveraged current yield from the property was about 10%. But the property had been under managed by the RTC, and its income would increase when several vacant stores were leased. Even more important, the largest tenant — who occupied around 20% of the project’s space — was paying rent of about $5 per foot, whereas other tenants averaged $70. The expiration of this bargain lease in nine years was certain to provide a major boost to earnings. The property’s location was also superb: NYU wasn't’t going anywhere.

I joined a small group — including Larry and my friend Fred Rose — in purchasing the building. Fred was an experienced, high-grade real estate investor who, with his family, would manage the property. And manage it they did. As old leases expired, earnings tripled. Annual distributions now exceed 35% of our initial equity investment. Moreover, our original mortgage was refinanced in 1996 and again in 1999, moves that allowed several special distributions totaling more than 150% of what we had invested.

The moral of this story is that you don't necessarily have to be an investment genius to reap from real estate investment. Secondly, real estate investment has the tendency to out perform other forms of investment with the passage of time.

References:
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/24/warren-buffett-berkshire-letter/
Wikipedia