I see a lot of people talking about rental properties and I don't think there's enough talk in favor of rental properties so here's my shot at it.
My philosophy of being a landlord is not to bank on appreciation, but rather find houses where the mortgage is well below what tenants are paying for. How do you find those kinds of houses? You buy dilapidated houses, renovate them and then rent them out. If you don't want to go through that work, there are middlemen called "turnkey providers" that renovate houses and then sell them to investors for a profit.
From there, you can decide whether to manage the property yourself (less passive) or hire a property manager (more passive). If you hire a property manager, they do all of the busy work associated with owning a house like finding tenants, collecting rent, evicting tenants. They do not get paid unless there is a tenant on the property so it's in their best interest to find you a good tenant.
The thing I like most about rental properties is four fold:
1) Positive cash flow (rent minus all operating costs)
2) Depreciation (in the US, you can depreciate the cost of the house--not land--over 27.5 years which usually makes the cash flow stated above tax free)
3) Principal payments (part of the mortgage the tenant pays goes into the principal of the property--usually around 30% of the first payment goes to principal if you put down 20% and it only goes up from there)
4) Appreciation (the house & land usually appreciates at pace with inflation)
Graham Stephan talks about this in his YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8wNUaBgZTk
Also remember, the longer you hold the property, the higher the rent will be while your 30 year loan will stay flat. This makes holding property much more appealing later on but with higher repair bills as well as things start to break.
There's a lot of advantages with owning homes IF you do the math correctly. Here's a video of Brandon Turner, the owner of Bigger Pockets, discussing how to analyze rental properties for the math to make sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uogn4qtZ8U
Also, if there's a downturn in the market, usually people that own homes move to rental properties.
If you're interested in rental properties, I'd suggest the bigger pockets forums where you can read about everyone doing this type of stuff:
https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums