VTSAX isn’t a free lunch, but you pay in risk rather than time spent managing real estate. It’s passive assuming you can handle drawdowns whereas real estate is passive assuming you think running a rental business is passive.

Truth -- running real rental businesses ain't easy. Renting out your former condo or something, a one-off, may not be hard, but it rapidly gets messy.

e.g. VTSAX doesn't have tenants who strip the copper out of the house and leave water running to spite you as you evict them.

VTSAX doesn't have surprise 15k roofing costs.

VTSAX doesn't for you to pay tenants triple if you don't follow / screw up rental laws.

VTSAX has a fairly small fee compared to what property managers charge.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal recently did a joke about this kinda. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/conscience

I don’t believe in efficient markets. I’m saying that there’s a lot of people sending their money to the SP500 on autopilot. The value-add of investors are

a) provide capital

b) re-allocate capital from less efficient to more efficient co’s.

The autopilot style of investing is good as far as it goes, but it risks inflating the SP500 far beyond what is logical, while starving smaller but still great companies of capital.

VTSAX is broader than the SP500 though: https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...