I read it as, but I could be wrong, that if you start out in life with money (parents/inheritance/...) and you decide wisely, like buying a house close to uni and putting in a shitload of students, then you have it easy.

I owned a student home which I bought from partly smart and mostly lucky stock investing (I had savings from strawberry picking (yes, really; that made money faster than coding in those days for me) and I put it on Borland before 2000; they went up big time, I sold at the right time and student me could buy a house suddenly); it was in a city with high student housing prices and it was a really good house for it; it was big and could house 8 (to 16 if pairs) students paying 8*400 euros/mo. It was not easy money though; I lived there too for a while and the constant maintenance drove me up the wall. I am (always was) mostly someone who lives in his head and thinking about code and leaking toilets, pipes, flooding etc really is something I cannot deal with. So I sold it after 4 years of getting stressed.

I definitely wouldn't do real estate again; I like virtual assets and the stock market & starting + selling companies treated me a lot better than real estate ever can do. Without the worries of brick & mortar.