All good advice here so far. I'll add a couple of thoughts that we sometimes overlook even though they should be obvious. These two things can make it exceedingly simple to build wealth through real estate. Basically it's just "buy and hold":
1. If you approach this as a long term investment instead of short term, you can generally take a more passive approach and build wealth just by holding. Even if you don't start with a great cash flowing property, over time you should do well (as long as you follow #2 below...). I'm now down to owning just one rental house, and it really is a poor cash flowing property (only breaking even on total carrying costs). But it is in a super desirable and expensive area, an established neighborhood, great schools, blah blah blah, with values skyrocketing and lots of insanely expensive new construction as older homes are torn down and $1 million homes are built on the lots. I can't predict the future, but I fully expect that through appreciation that home will generate substantially more wealth for us than if I sold it and invested the money elsewhere, or if I had invested in a cash-flowing property somewhere else.
2. If you own real estate in a good neighborhood, it's almost impossible not to build significant wealth over enough time. The magic of paying down the mortgage, appreciation, rising rents/inflation, and leverage is sometimes hard to overemphasize. A reasonable 5% gain on the value of a home can of course dwarf much larger percentage gains in other investments. As an example, if you put 20% down on a $200,000 house, your "investment" or equity would be $40,000. If the house goes up in value 5% in one year, you will have made $10,000. But if you had put your $40,000 into stocks, you would need a 25% increase to match that $10,000 gain (and if anyone knows a reliable stock buying strategy that returns 25%, let me know). And of course stocks don't give you any tax advantages while you hold them like real estate can, nor can they generate rent payments like real estate.
So, if you're buying a good home in a good area, and can hold it for the long term, you can potentially give in on some of those other "rules" about getting a perfect cash flowing property. There are literally zero homes where I live that meet the 50% rule or the 1-2% rule, and if I had limited myself by those rules I would have missed out on large gains over the years. "Buy and hold" can be a perfectly acceptable strategy.