Why commercial real estate?

I came to CRE in a unique way. 20 yrs as a Fed, a military healthcare CIO+, I was one of 5 hired by DoD in response to two then-new Title 10 (military law) statutes (2222 & 186). The other four covered the other services: one for Navy, one for Army, one for Air Force, one for Personnel and Readiness, and myself for military healthcare. My title was to become Chief for Defense Business Transformation for the Military Healthcare System (MHS). My mission was to change investment decision-making behavior in the Military Healthcare System for the modernization, development, and enhancement portfolio. That's a long way to say: they hired me and gave me the civilian rank equivalent of an Army Colonel or a Navy Captain to improve the way DoD makes investment decisions.
They gave me $2.5M/yr and my SES boss said "keep me out of jail." I hired and talked with a scrum of investment bankers, attorneys, analysts++ and set to work deconstructing the current process, mapping military OPTAR to civilian financial statements, and "finding" vs "creating from scratch" the best investment decision-making model we could.
After a lot of searching/experimenting, we found CRE. It has all the right elements I believed we needed: a master plan that anyone in the world could access, zoning, due diligence, application process, permitting, post-build inspections, and 100+ years of precedent. We changed the names to protect the innocent and handed them our proposal. I was told it looked great. "Now go break it."
My teams and I ran $1B of investment activity through the model. We sent $200M of uncooked, poorly formed investment ideas back to the Treasury. We identified $300M more that we lacked the horsepower to wrench loose. Our model worked.

I was sitting at home one day thinking: if this is the best model the US has to offer (that my team of smart people could find), why am I not using this for my family? I pooled my money with retail money from other HNW individuals (doctors, lawyers, dentists & others with personal dry powder) into Reg D syndications, and started buying apartment buildings in Texas. We'd buy at $8M, take advantage of the formula Value=NOI/Caprate, and sell at $10M three years later.
I later ran into a Goldman ex-banker/friend/mentor/colleague who helped refine my thinking. "Shut that down and focus on institutional money instead of retail money." he said. "Insurance companies, discretionary real estate funds, family offices, etc will be professional, sterile and have a lot deeper pockets than dentists and doctors."
Indeed, he was right. I was once again working with six, seven, and eight zeroes as I was for the government. But this time, I was working for my family's benefit instead of a government ideal that frankly, the government never really wanted to implement (no one truly liked it when we took away their obligation authority. It messed with individual's promotion potential & power structure).
If I were asked this question in an interview today (god forbid I ever need to interview again), I would focus on the strength of the decision-making system, the tax advantages, the support structure, inefficiencies in the market, and the people. The fact that I can syndicate capital, purchase insurance for the asset, depreciate the asset, and leverage so high into the capital stack, gives this asset class some unique value and earns it a place in every portfolio.