- Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett was asked at the company's annual shareholder meeting on Saturday about investing in real estate, which he has largely avoided. He has preferred buying and selling stocks for Berkshire's portfolio, saying real estate deals can get tricky and bogged down in negotiations.
Investing legend Warren Buffett, who plans to step down later this year as Berkshire Hathaway CEO, is well known for his wizardry in stocks, but not real estate.
During the conglomerate's annual shareholder meeting on Saturday, he was asked why he isn't buying property right now, amid high rates and economic uncertainty.
"Well, in respect to real estate, it's so much harder than stocks in terms of negotiation of deals, time spent, and the involvement of multiple parties in the ownership," Buffett replied. "Usually when real estate gets in trouble, you find out you’re dealing with more than just the equity holder."
The famously value-oriented investor acknowledged that there have been times when real estate was a bargain, but stocks were cheaper and could be bought more easily.
He added that the late Charlie Munger, who was Berkshire's vice chairman until his death in 2023, engaged in more real estate deals and did a significant number of them in the last five years of his life.
"But he was playing a game that was interesting to him," Buffett said.
Still, he believes that if Munger had a choice between investing only in stocks or only in real estate, his former right-hand man would've picked stocks.
"There’s just so much more opportunity, at least in the United States, that presents itself in the security market than in real estate," Buffett added.
Another wrinkle in real estate is that a single owner or a family often owns a large property that they’ve had for a long time, so making a deal is an enormous decision for them, he explained.
By contrast, stock deals involving billions of dollars can be done in minutes, totally anonymously, and are final, Buffett said.
Berkshire made a few real estate deals in 2008 and 2009, when the mortgage bust sank real estate and financial markets, but the amount of time they took to close couldn't compete with stock trades.
"The completion rate for working on anything in stocks, assuming you’ve got a meeting of the minds on price, is essentially 100%," he pointed out. "In real estate, the negotiation just begins when you agree on deals, and then they take forever. For a 94-year-old, it's not the most interesting thing to get involved in something where the negotiations could take years."
Buffett's comments come as the stock market has undergone enormous volatility amid President Donald Trump's on-again, off-again trade war.
Stocks crashed in April after he unveiled his "Liberation Day" tariffs, but rebounded and recouped those losses by Friday as Trump granted delays and exceptions, while signaling progress on trade deals.
In March, National Association of Realtors chief economist Lawrence Yun noted that real estate wealth was at all-time highs while stocks wobbled.
"Maybe people will begin to focus to say, where is stability?" he told CNBC. "Some people are turning towards gold, but maybe other people will turn to the solid foundation of real estate where the mortgage default rate is still near historically low levels."
