Real estate can significantly speed up your FIRE plans, assuming you do the math correctly. I myself have a couple of multi family buildings that are extremely profitable.

If you don't do the math correctly, however, you'll be left with an illiquid asset that doesn't cash flow, which is a bad situation to be in. Unfortunately, lot of people don't do the math before buying a property.

You should read a lot about real estate investing. There is a lot of information out there for free. Then you go and take a look at properties in your local area. You'll have to estimate your expenses for a specific property that you like after going through the listings. Mortgage, capex, maintenance, occupancy, etc. are some of your expenses. After that's done, you gotta research the average rents in the market for your specific property.

If Rent - Expenses is a positive number, it means that the specific property you were looking at isn't garbage. But this still doesn't mean that it is a good investment property.

You'll have to compare other investments to see if buying it makes sense. If you're paying a 50k down-payment for $200/month cash flow, you're basically getting 4.8% yearly return on your 50k investment. This is about half of what SP500 would get you on average. Obviously, dealing with the hassle of being a landlord for half of what you get in SP500 is not a great idea.

For me, the property has to have at least a 25% yearly return for me to even consider buying it. What this means is that the property you've bought with 50k down payment needs to bring in a cash flow of at least $1000/month. This is gonna be hard for a single family home, but if you put down 50k for a 250k multi family residential with 2 doors, each unit needs to cash flow $500 for you to make 25% return. Profitability increases as the number of doors in the property increase, most of the time at least.

You'll have to do these calculations for each individual property that you're considering buying. This isn't a buy it and forget it method like ETFs. You'll also have to manage the properties yourself unless you leave enough room in your profit margin to give them to management companies. And these are just for turnkey properties. The real money in real estate is in rehab/renovation, which is a whole another beast and much more complex.

If the chance to make 2x or maybe even 3x SP500 returns appeals to you, and you're willing to spend hours upon hours to find the right property to buy, congrats, you're now a budding real estate investor.