Can I buy real estate with my Schwab IRA?

No. Schwab does not hold direct real estate in retirement accounts, and the reason is the same one that applies across the retail brokerage industry: it is an operationally different business from custodying securities.

What Schwab actually offers

Schwab has built out private market access for qualifying clients, and it is genuinely more than it was five years ago. What that access looks like:

• Real estate funds and private market vehicles through their alternatives platform, subject to eligibility and minimums.
• Publicly traded REITs and REIT ETFs, in any account, with no special access required.
• Interval and non-traded funds, where offered.

What it does not include is a deed. If you have found a specific property, negotiated a specific price, and want your IRA to be the entity on the closing statement, Schwab is not the venue.

It is worth being clear about which of these you want, because they are often confused. Real estate exposure is available at Schwab today, for free, in about four clicks. Real estate ownership is a different thing with different custodians, different costs, and different rules.

The difference in one table

	REIT or fund at Schwab	Direct property at a self-directed custodian
Who picks the asset	The fund manager	You
Liquidity	Same day	Months, and only if a buyer shows up
Annual cost	Fund expense ratio	Custodian fees plus fund expenses, if any
Annual valuation	Automatic	Your responsibility
Ways to disqualify the account	Essentially none	Several, most of them easy to trip
Correlation to the stock market	High	Low
Control over operations	None	Complete, within the rules

Neither column is the right answer in general. They answer different questions.

If you want the building

The path is the same as from any brokerage.

Open the self-directed IRA first and get an account number. Then have the new custodian pull from Schwab as a direct trustee to trustee transfer, matching account types exactly, traditional to traditional or Roth to Roth. Sell your positions to cash inside the Schwab IRA before the transfer, since self-directed custodians generally cannot take mutual fund shares in kind. Selling inside the IRA is not a taxable event.

Move only what the purchase, the closing costs, and a serious cash reserve require. Leave the rest invested at Schwab. There is no reason to relocate a portfolio to buy one property, and every reason not to: self-directed custodians are not good or cheap places to hold index funds.

Then wait. Transfers take one to three weeks in the ordinary case, and every step after funding is slower than its estimate. Do not go under contract against money that has not landed.

The thing that surprises Schwab clients most

Speed. Schwab has trained you to expect that moving money is instant and free. A self-directed custodian works on written directions with processing queues. An earnest money wire is a form, a review, and a few business days.

If you are competing for a property against a buyer with a checkbook, plan for that reality at the offer stage rather than discovering it during due diligence. Build longer timelines into the contract, and tell your agent up front that the funds come from a custodian.

Before you start

The obligations that come with the self-directed account are real and permanent: an annual fair market valuation you have to produce, a strict wall between the account's money and yours, several hundred dollars a year in fees, and prohibited transaction rules with a consequence measured in the entire account balance rather than a penalty.

Know that side of it before the transfer, not after.